by John Lingan
It was an era of agitation for Indian rights. In the summer of 1979, a federal court awarded the Sioux tribe more than $100 million in damages for their forced removal from Idaho’s Black Hills region. The Sioux refused to take the money and began a prolonged, violent standoff. Joe patrolled the occupation’s border with Ward Churchill and a group of John Birch Society members—imperfect but willing partners who had come on board out of shared contempt for the U.S. government. Two thousand miles from Highland Ridge, Joe had finally found a principled stand against the capitalist overthrow of rural folkways.
This was becoming a pattern. Despite his unbroken lifelong identification as a Virginia redneck, Joe seemed to always find his greatest common cause with people outside that mold, whether the upper-class gay friend who supplied his acid, the black coworkers he gained after Winchester businesses desegregated, or the minorities he encountered on trips through Central America, the delta South, and prairie West. He later became so well known for his dissection of rural white exploitation that his reputation overshadowed the real desires in his writing. He never pined for a return to backwoods white culture for its own sake; he wanted only community, connection, one-ness in the metaphysical and political sense, and he genuflected before any person or population that he felt understood those values, regardless of where they learned them. People who worked with their hands, who studied widely, who sought to open their third eye—anyone who rejected money as the be-all, end-all, and especially anyone who was exploited by profiteers.
And for all his obsession with Winchester, this value system came into sharpest focus during his time in Colorado. Self-fulfillment was the gospel of Boulder in the 1960s and 1970s, and Joe would look back on his time there as one of the happiest periods in his life: “All these years later I am beginning to understand the effect [that] living for a decade or so in a genuinely free time and place had on my life,” he wrote in his Deer Hunting period, calling Boulder “paradise.” But for all his expanded consciousness, after a decade in Colorado, Joe still hadn’t managed to buy his family a house or develop a real career. Right before the dawn of the 1980s, right as Jeanne Mozier was opening up Berkeley Springs for East Coast hippie exploration, Joe made the agonizing decision to return home, to see if he could make a proper life in Winchester once more.
Joe had left town as a high school dropout, teen father, and purported drug casualty, but he returned as a seasoned journalist, and ended up working for the Byrds once again, this time on the staff of the Winchester Star. Remnants of the Granola Belt still clung to him: he kept twenty containers of vitamins in his office to advertise a strict regimen that he’d heard would give him total recall. But he also had a newfound confidence, even a swagger. He claimed a battered, dumpster-bound desk and high-backed chair for his office and wore a suit every day, fashioning himself a boisterous newspaperman. As editor of the local news section, he pushed his writers to dig more deeply into local political corruption. Needless to say, this did not enamor him to the Byrds, and neither did his push to unionize the newspaper staff. Virginia had a right-to-work statute in place since 1947 thanks in great part to Senator Harry Flood Byrd himself, and in any case the gospel of self-sufficiency made collective bargaining sound vaguely sinister, like something only Yankees and communists dared. The effort went nowhere.
It was 1979. The Apple Blossom Mall, the inland port, the factories—they were all still a few years away. But the failed unionization effort showed Joe that the bastards were still on the march and untouchable in Winchester. The town ran on money. People weren’t looking for broadened horizons. And for someone with a bookshelf and a social conscience, there wasn’t much solace to be found.
The only social comfort Joe had was a small group of guys who got together every few weeks to smoke pot and swim in the river, talking about books and politics. These were mostly outsiders, come-heres like the realtor Nick Smart, who sold Joe his first house. Nick grew up in Falls Church, Virginia, the heart of the D.C. suburbs, but left for Paris after college in 1959. He found his way to the Beat Hotel, where he lived on the same hall as Ginsberg and Burroughs. When he returned stateside, Nick married a younger girl from his hometown and, still flush with radical energy, set off for Paw Paw, West Virginia, where a rural commune was starting. For years, Nick and his wife were among the million-odd white Americans who went “back to the land” during the Vietnam era. Joe’s experience in Boulder wasn’t quite so rustic—no compost toilet or geodesic dome—but philosophically he was right in line with the readership of The Foxfire Book, The Modern Utopian, and Mother Earth News. He would eventually mourn how the media diminished the ’60s as “a handful of newsreel snippets of the Haight Ashbury, Kent State, long hair, Vietnam and the Beatles.” Joe knew the truth: a great portion of the counterculture lived among trees and wide skies, and he connected with Nick over their shared recognition of this.
Like many of their back-to-the-land peers, Nick and his wife returned to civilization when they had children and suddenly realized the limits of communard education. They moved to Winchester in 1974, when Nick became a realtor. By the time Nick met Joe, he was already familiar with the trade-offs that one makes in order to live in a place with good schools and pretty landscaping. He once asked a fellow businessman if he knew The Great Gatsby, and the man replied, “Is he from Frederick County?”
Nevertheless, Nick made his peace with the place, as so many come-heres would do over the following decades, including Barbara Dickinson and Matt Hahn. Relative to the D.C. region, Winchester was affordable, safe, and close to nature. Nick had a good public school for his girls and a growing market in which to learn the real estate trade. Joe had no such comforts; he knew the place too well. He saw its calmness as conformism, knew its natural scenery was shrinking and underappreciated. The Star, his only creative outlet, was a reactionary, right-wing, small-town paper owned by descendants of the man who made the Shenandoah synonymous with greed and small-mindedness. Plus, Joe had woes at home. He and Cindy separated in 1979, and Joe was devastated. He’d found his way into the Winchester middle class but didn’t get any comfort from it. The divorce, as he surely recognized, would disrupt Timothy’s life right at the age when Joe’s had been shaken by the loss of Over Home. Adrift, he retreated to Colorado, the only place since where he felt that he truly belonged.
Trouble was, the forces of money and corporatization were bearing down on Boulder too. The city’s conversion from hippie outpost to yuppie playground was well underway. The “People’s Republic” vibe was losing out to higher costs of living and that perennial Virginia bugaboo, real estate development. The Musical Express was no more, though Joe managed freelance features with other local and national magazines. He also met a bright and idealistic woman named Nancy, who was writing a newsletter for the well-known Boulder Free School.
United in their disappointment over paradise lost, Joe and Nancy settled on a last-ditch response: in 1982, they got married and dropped out. Joe knew from his earlier travels that Indian land was cheap and set-apart, so they set out for the Coeur D’Alene reservation in the Idaho panhandle. But this was no longer the utopian moment that had attracted Nick and his wife and a million others. And anyway, most of those middle-class homesteaders a decade earlier had tried some kind of communal arrangement, whether sharing a house between multiple families or joining a collective like The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee. Joe and Nancy, by comparison, found a desolate, forest-adjacent plot about 10 miles from the nearest town, St. Maries. In case it wasn’t clear enough that the peaceful ’60s dream was over, their regional neighbors included Richard Butler’s Aryan Nation compound.
The shack they bought had no electricity, running water, or address. It was located on a dirt road about halfway up a mountain, which must have recalled Shanghai Road. Joe worked tirelessly, clearing forest and planting a garden behind the house. He built a barn for horses and livestock, and tended bar at the reservation for spare cash. He had no time for writing, though he returned
to painting, the hobby he’d had since childhood. He insisted on giving his work away for free to friends and visitors. Into this world of exile, art, and survivalist labor, Joe and Nancy’s first child, Patrick, was born in November 1982. Their second, Elizabeth, arrived in May 1984.
To the extent that any couple can remove themselves from the politics and culture of a country while still living there, Joe and Nancy managed it, living more or less self-sufficiently other than rare trips to the St. Maries’ food co-op. But as a quest for personal happiness it wasn’t nearly so successful. The kids reached school age by 1988, and by that point the pressure of self-sufficiency had become unbearable. Like his father before him, Joe took his kids from the country to the city, in this case Moscow, Idaho, on the border with Washington. He and Nancy divorced soon after.
Having grown up in an unimaginably close-knit rural family and community, Joe was now forty-two years old with three children, two failed marriages, and no clear home. He took up writing again, this time for a local paper, the Idahonian, where he edited the Lifestyles section and wrote a regular first-person column. From his easy but musical style you wouldn’t guess that he’d been chopping wood and tending to horses for the previous six years. He interviewed Woodstock attendees for the festival’s twentieth anniversary, and touched on politics by talking to locals like “Big Leroy” about everything from gas prices to Vietnam veterans.
On January 23, 1990, Joe wrote an Idahonian column about Mississippi, particularly its blues traditions and poverty. The essay was wistful, even tender. After an evocative litany of southern scenery—kudzu, field hands, “bobbing white cotton”—he ended on a disarmingly vulnerable, not political, note: “I miss it. I really do.”
Around this time he met Barbara, who was living in Pullman, Washington, right across the border. They were both stranded in rural college towns, but it turned out that she and Joe had more in common than isolation. For one, they were both divorced parents. And a decade earlier, Barbara had been an antiwar protester and vocal feminist in Madison, raising her son in a reflexively liberal community steeped in Gloria Steinem and Free to Be You and Me. From the first, she recognized a fellow traveler. Joe had no misogynist edge like many men of his era. Instead, they could talk about books and music. He cooked for her and reminisced about his own radical days, and slowly, hesitantly, they fell in love.
After getting married, Joe and Barbara pushed west. Eugene, Oregon, was a more liberal, cosmopolitan town than Moscow, but the move heralded the straightest, most middle-class period of Joe’s life. He got a job for Crop Production Management, a glossy trade magazine that had one client, Conagra, which sent copies to its every customer. As editor, Joe was compelled to live the same impossibly lavish lifestyle as his publisher: dinners out on the corporate card, frequent jet trips to San Francisco, and expenses-paid vacations to Las Vegas with the wives where a $500 shopping allowance waited for them at check-in. Joe was suddenly a man for whom scotch preceded dinner, and dinner preceded brandy. Which is to say, he had finally caught up to the business class that ran Winchester, and to the kind of corporation, Conagra, that had driven the postwar Shanghai Road community into cities to be their subalterns.
And it made him miserable. He finally had money of his own, more than he’d ever expected to have, and came to the clichéd realization that it didn’t quiet his mind or offer any sense of meaning. And so he asked Barbara, what about Winchester? It was quiet and safe. They could be near family. With their savings and the lower cost of living, they could live right downtown, blocks from the beautiful, newly refurbished walking mall.
Their house was on the west side of town, far from the train tracks and closer to Washington Street, where JudySue had pointed out each wealthy family by name. With its pillars and spires, theirs fit right in, even if they had to clean a little black mold off the walls. The work kept Joe’s hands busier than they’d been in years.
As promised, Barbara liked all the nearby woods and the broad sky. They made regular trips to the Blue Ridge and stared into the vastness that had entranced everyone from Alexander Spotswood to Jim McCoy. They took walks through every corner of downtown, and Joe had a story or a bit of gossip or a historical anecdote for them all. There were nights when the sunset was like a landscape painting. For a while, it appeared they’d made the transition from coastal middle-class boredom to something more rooted and fulfilling. Barbara even took a job doing genealogy research at the Handley Library.
Since Joe’s last extended stay twenty years earlier, Winchester had become unrecognizable. There were new companies, and plenty of new monstrosities like Creekside Village. The Hispanic share of the population had nearly tripled, from just over 3 percent to more than 8 percent, many of whom worked in the apple industry. But a few things were familiar. His romantic memories were more painful at close range. He commuted every morning to his editing job at Military History magazine on the Harry F. Byrd Highway, and remembered just how permanent and indestructible the line had felt between his own family and the midcentury Winchester wealthy. More than 50 percent of Winchester residences were rentals, a fact Joe gleaned from conversations at working-class bars like the Royal Lunch, the Twilight Zone, and Coalie Harry’s. He also learned that the biggest landlords served on the local government, and had efficiently excised any regulations for rental properties. The old anger returned, accompanied and amplified by the memory of his father trembling when the rent money ran out, and soon Joe founded the Winchester Tenant’s Board.
He interviewed renters and gave away his own money when they needed it. He killed rats in the unregulated apartments and brought them to city council meetings in a cardboard box—anything to call attention to the abuse. While still commuting an hour each way during the week, Joe wrote regular scathing letters to the Star, detailing the exploitation. They published them, but nothing changed. So he ranted to Barbara, and to his bar mates. Soon the Twilight Zone could no longer contain his exasperation, and he began writing in chat rooms under the screen name “ScreamingMan.” Then came “Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy,” his first essay to be published online. It evoked a hellscape of contemporary southern deterioration: low-wage assembly-line jobs, rampant obesity, health-care price gouging, Limbaugh on a loop.
Similar tracts—about guns, alcohol, Pentecostalism, and other pillars of trailer-born Dixie living—appeared more frequently than most people exercise. His prose had always galloped, but now it became unstoppable. His essays were uniformly long-winded, comprising massive chunks of text that encompassed evocative memories, deep history, and present-day Winchester scenes. He was at the vanguard of political blogging, and his essays were published at some of the progressive left’s more strident outposts, like EnergyGrid and CounterPunch. But Joe rarely wrote about the news. More often he wrote about anger, guilt, despair, drugs, and the lived experience of poverty and ill education. He rarely mentioned specific politicians, and when he did, he singled out corporatist democrats like Bill Clinton and John Kerry as often as he mentioned the then-current president.
This ornery, indefinable work proved relatable. Within months of his first publication, Joe was receiving so many fan e-mails that Ken Smith, a fan himself who had offered to create and manage joebageant.com, started running them on the site. They came from Fair Oaks, California, and Auburn, Washington; Du Quoin, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa; Chatsworth Island, Australia; Leeds, Vancouver, Beijing. The writers tended to be Joe’s age, with a similar perspective on America’s fall. “My roots are in the Texas dirt, but I made a journey through the student radical acid communal left,” said one. “Your articles remind me so much of my family. They are the same pissed off, ignorant white trash that fought their way from Virginia, through the Appalachians, to East Texas,” said another.
As Joe’s career took off, his rage became his brand. Reporters came to visit him and he put on a fishing vest and drove them up to the Royal Lunch and the Troubadour to show them how real folks lived. Joe garnered a reputat
ion as a red-state Virgil, a guide to rural American disaffection writ large. In one photo essay from 2006, done in conjunction with a British photographer, he described Winchester by saying “This is my home. Home to everything thoughtless and dangerous about America these days, home to most of the people I have loved and certainly home to all my ghosts.” After a tour through downtown, full of bile about the “Jim Crow apple,” conservative Christianity, and the town’s enduring Civil War preoccupation, Joe finally takes his guest up to the Troubadour, “one of the last tonk joints in our area. Suburbanization has driven them out. But the Troubadour still has a remote feel in that it is up on top of a mountain.” Even in a short, tossed-off essay, his relief is palpable. “If you can’t find hillbilly love here, honey, you’re probably a Yankee.”
Around this time, when the endless recording sessions for Matt Hahn Sings the Songs of Jim McCoy were underway, Joe was at work on his own demanding project. He signed his book deal in May 2005, making him the first person to jump from political blogging to mainstream publishing. The proposed title was DRINK, PRAY, FIGHT, FUCK: Dispatches from America’s Class Wars, though late in the editorial process it was changed to avoid confusion with, of all things, Eat Pray Love.