Springtime in the Country

Editor’s Note: This essay is excerpted with permission from the author’s environmental memoir, Back to Abnormal: Surviving With An Old Farm in the New South, Motesbooks, March, 2010

It’s not the crocuses by Mama’s side porch, or grape hyacinths under the big cedar or yellow jonquils flagging Georgia’s roadsides which announce the coming of spring to me- it’s the southern wood violet and how its arrival affects the way we walk around Grace Farm. Some early morning in March or
even late February, one of us will glance down to watch for ankle-twisting stump holes, stop in our tracks, and moan, “Oh, no. Look!” There it is: the first teeny patch of violets. Lovely they may be in their miniscule daintiness, but we know their power. Our violets have won the queen’s heart and her protection.
Mama can’t bear to lose a single tiny blossom. She would as soon stomp on kittens’ heads as crush these miniature wildflowers, and we are all shamed into compliance through her example. For six weeks or more to come, we won’t so much walk our forty acres as lurch, leap and sidestep inch-high clusters of
violets.

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The positive side of being thwarted in any designs we may have had on Bethlehem, Georgia’s Lawn-of-the-Month award is that my family is doing our small part to uphold the southern tradition of each community having its oddball characters. That’s a good thing, because I don’t want small-town Georgia to lose its  haracter- either of thehuman sort or in our landscapes. I can’t remember any of the towns I’ve lived in not having an old man who covered his fence posts with Nehi Orange bottle caps, or a woman who wore a heavy wool coat through Savannah summers, or her daughter who never married but carried a dog tucked under her arm every waking moment, or a grove of falling-down cracker houses with three
generations of sofas on the front porch. The southern right to inter a worn-out sofa onto your porch was recently challenged in nearby Athens, to great uproar and protestation against loss of personal freedom.

I’ve been thinking a lot about personal freedom since I came back to the farm to live, partly because of my ongoing battle against ATVs. These fat-tired motorized rhinos have claimed our dirt road as their weekend racetrack. Or, rather, their drivers have. It gets worse every month as more and more subdivisions pop up around us. People who used to live in one of the counties immediately surrounding Atlanta proper are abandoning paved-over, congested Gwinnett County and Dekalb County in favor of Barrow County. I can only assume these new Barrow Countians consider a dirt road walled by woods as public green space. “It’s just an old dirt road. Why shouldn’t I play on it with my dirt bike or ATV?” Because it’s illegal to ride any off-road vehicle on a public road, that’s why. “Nobody’s living in these woods. Why shouldn’t I ride my ATV through them?” Because they’re not your woods, that’s why. And because the weight of your machine is killing my Queen Anne’s Lace, my Fleabane, my Pipsissewa, even my southern wood violets.

Not that I would ever present that last listing as argument to any of the cami-garbed guys I stop mid-road. You can’t ride that ATV here. “Why not, lady?” Because you’re crushing the violets. “Oh, God, sorry! I didn’t know.

I’ll call my buddy to bring his pickup to get me.” Nope, what I do is stand in the middle of the road with Fred-the-big-red-dog on his leash and my cell phone in my other hand. Fred hates anything with tires. When he sees an ATV (or motorcycle or F-150 or tricycle) he lunges and slathers (always an effective combination of deterrents) while I call the sheriff with my free hand. Dogs, sheriffs and an angry landowner—the great southern trinity of law enforcement. Make that one crazy-haired lady landowner who is rapidly gaining a reputation as a weirdo, and I can usually put the skids on ATV play, at least for right then.

But do I have the right? Legally, yes. In Georgia, in Barrow County, it is illegal to drive or ride any off-road vehicle on a public road. This comes as a rude surprise to many new arrivals. They have moved to the country to get away from urban sprawl, to have a little ease from restrictions. Isn’t that sort of freedom also my desire and aim? Yes, but I prefer to gain ease from life’s restrictions by blending into the quiet of my woods, by letting nature take the upper hand. So far as I can tell, ATV-ers want access to  undeveloped land in order to destroy it. They want into my woods so they can kill all the small life growing on the floor of my woods, so they can kill the stillness, so they can kill the smells of reindeer moss and pine needle beds and wet white clay. They would disavow this, of course, and with actual sincerity. After all, how can someone be held accountable for setting out to kill what they don’t know is there? You
can’t see reindeer moss when you’re sitting atop several tons of fiberglass and steel. You can’t hear a forest’s various modes of silence over a gas engine’s howl. Wet clay’s cleanly sharp odor is smothered by gas emissions as thoroughly as new puppies drowned in a sack.

Who in a motorized world notices the small and the silent? I do, as Emily Dickinson did:

“A little bread- a crust- a crumb-
A little trust- a demijohn-
Can keep the soul alive-”

I need a dose of wildness to keep my soul alive. We all do. Any headbutting which goes on between me and ATV owners has its origin in our differing ideas of what ‘wildness’ is. ATV wildness comes at the world from the outside, in the form of a deafening gas engine carried along by eco-system-flattening tires entering undeveloped areas in order to enjoy by destroying. This is pleasure through conquest. I am of the pleasurethrough-conjuncture school. Conjuncture: “a combination; as of events or circumstances.” Have you ever had a relationship in which strong love spilled over into strong desire, and vice-versa? Then you know what I mean by conjuncture- you submerse yourself in someone or something outside of yourself and find not that you lose yourself but that you emerge as more than you were before.

I find all too many people lately believing in the progression to a stronger, more assured self through accumulation of goods. It’s like that cold weather advice our TV announcers always give before the harshest day of winter: dress in layers because layers give greatest protection from the cold. Our popular culture wants to assure us that our greatest protection from anomie will be gained through the layering on of possessions. If those possessions in some way mimic sentience- if beeps and roars and whistles make them sound alive; if response to some signal on our part makes them act alive; if movement and heat and breath-like exhalations make them look alike- we are even more disposed to accept Blackberries and I-Pods and ATVs as indicators not only of self-worth, but of character affirmation.

The truth is that our individual character becomes most evident when we are most stripped of our accoutrements, when we are what we are, and not what we possess.

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— Dana Wildsmith is the author of an environmental memoir, Back to Abnormal: Surviving with an Old Farm in the New South (MotesBooks), four collections of poetry: One Good Hand Iris Press, 2005), Our Bodies Remember (The Sow’s Ear Press, 2000), Annie (Palanquin Press, 1999), Alchemy (The Sow’s Ear Press, 1995), and an audio collection, Choices ( Iris Press). Wildsmith lives in Bethlehem, Georgia. She is employed as an English Literacy Instructor through Lanier Technical College.