by Sarah Smarsh
The rope between the truck and the canoe grew slack as Arnie shifted gears. Old Brownie tilted sharply as it crested the dirt mound at the edge of a wheat field, and I whispered a prayer: Please God, don’t let us get hurt.
“Hold on to your butts!” Grandma Betty yelled, her beer splashing as we broke out onto the open field and Grandpa hit the gas.
I pressed my face against Betty’s back as Arnie sped us through another dip in the field that was so familiar to him. Betty’s arms were wrapped around someone’s, maybe her sister’s. Shelly’s arms were wrapped around my waist. To keep from falling out of the boat, we shifted our centers with every turn.
People pay for a version of that now. They pay for hayrack rides through pumpkin patches, a safe industry called “agritourism.” They go to bars that use Mason jars for glasses. They even throw expensive weddings in barns. Somehow, I got the real thing, increasingly rare in an urbanizing world.
I would have passed all sorts of poverties to you. But some late night a tractor would have pulled you, well fed by what we grew, under a clear sky full of stars. That laughter—that freedom—would have been the fortune you inherited.
We were country people in the middle of the country, living in a way that, I gather from things they’ve said to me over the years, some middle-class people in cities and suburbs on coasts thought had died long ago. For someone who never worked a farm, for whom the bread and meat in deli sandwiches seemed to magically materialize without agricultural labor, the center of the country was a place flown over but not touched.
“I haven’t heard of anything like that since The Grapes of Wrath,” people with different backgrounds would say to me in all seriousness when I described life on the farm. They thought we didn’t exist anymore, when in fact we just existed in places they never went. It was an easy way to think, I guess. I rarely saw the place I called home described or tended to in political discourse, the news media, or popular culture as anything but a stereotype or something that happened a hundred years ago.
We were so invisible as to be misrepresented even in caricature, lumped in with other sorts of poor whites, derogatory terms applied to us even if they didn’t make sense.
We lived on the open prairie, so we weren’t the “hillbillies” of the Smoky Mountains or the Ozarks. We weren’t “roughnecks” in oil fields; Kansas had a humble tap on oil thousands of feet below the prairie, but nothing like Oklahoma or Texas to the south.
“Redneck” and “cracker” didn’t quite translate, since their American usage was rooted in the slave South, against which Kansas had lit many of the fires that sparked the Civil War. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 allowed those territories to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery, abolitionists fought border wars with slaveholders across the line in Missouri. “Bloody Kansas,” historians call the period, and that blood ensured that Kansas would be established as a free state. Kansas and Missouri still have a cultural rivalry more than 150 years later. That’s not to say white abolitionists were morally righteous on the matter of race or that black and brown Kansans were treated well. But it’s a different history to come out of, as a poor white.
Slang terms for my plains ancestors who built dwellings there from sod, the only available material for lack of trees, didn’t survive in common vernacular. We were so willfully forgotten in American culture that the most common slur toward us was one applied to poor whites anywhere: “white trash.” Or, since we moved in and out of mobile homes, “trailer trash.”
There’s an image in popular culture of the poor white female version: a smoke hanging out of her mouth, a baby on one hip, and the screen door to her trailer propped open with the other. You could say my mother was that woman and I was that baby, and that you would have been that baby, too. But as members of all sorts of stereotyped groups know, the popular image—selected or fixated upon by someone more powerful than you—doesn’t tell you much about the life.
For one thing, anyone who has lived it knows that what matters less than the trailer is where the trailer is parked. Ours was in the country by my father’s choice, on the land where he later built our house. The place was thought boring for being grassland—mountains and forests being the landscapes that more often inspire awe—but without hills and trees we had a bigger sky than Montana, an unobstructed view of bright color between dark thunder clouds like nothing I’ve ever seen elsewhere. Those displays were so grand outside a single-wide metal dwelling on wheels that it felt less like us having a good view than like God having a view of us. I could feel how small we were.
I knew, so deeply that I wasn’t even conscious of it, that my family was on the outside of something considered normal. That normalized thing was the city, suburbs, even little burgs of three thousand people. We called them all “town,” even the small ones seeming to lord over us when we wore dirty jeans to visit a bank teller wearing a suit from Dillard’s. Places with banks, schools, stores, and county courthouses—let alone skyscrapers—represented to us a sort of power we were removed from, a disenfranchisement not only by culture but by geographic distance.
This bred in us a distrust of just about anyone who held a power we didn’t—even those who tried to help.
“I never seen a dime of it,” Grandpa Arnie would say about Farm Aid, the concert fund-raiser begun in 1985 to save dying family farms. The founders were white singers from humble places: Willie Nelson, who was born the son of an auto mechanic during the Great Depression and spent the summers of his youth picking cotton in the Texas heat. John Cougar Mellencamp, who was born in small-town Indiana and became a grandfather at age thirty-seven. Neil Young—well, he was a middle-class hippie from Canada. Grandpa Arnie didn’t know or care about any of that. All he knew was that he’d never been to a big concert in his life, and he wouldn’t get to go to this one.
Whether or not famous singers in cowboy boots testified before Congress, public policy went on selling us right up the rivers of corporate monopolies and factory farming. It was hardly a new story but reached its sad climax under Reagan. All around us, farm loans were underwater. Old farmers died and their kids sold everything off; many of them had already moved to cities, which their parents often encouraged for their survival.
That economic collapse deepened a consensus within society that a talented person from the country would endeavor to “get out.” Some did. They got scholarships to college, blew town, and—their politics and economic prospects having changed—never looked back. That “rural flight” made way for the idea that country people can’t “make it” in a bustling metropolis. But the ability to measure distances for planting alfalfa and smell the right moment to cut it isn’t so different from the ability to map out a subway trip and feel when a stop has been missed.
Like all industrialized countries, America started out country and turned city. My people didn’t turn with it. Instead of striving toward glowing economic meccas, they stayed on tractors in fields, or in small towns where life struck many of them as not just good enough but preferable to bigger places. Often, it’s not that country people can’t hack the city but that they choose not to—or life just played out differently regardless of their desires.
The Kentucky farmer and activist Wendell Berry wrote for The Atlantic in 1991, “The only sustainable city—and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal—is a city in balance with its countryside,” one that would pay “all its ecological and human debts.” Those human debts might be to the indigenous people pushed off the land where a Western city would rise, or to black slaves who worked Southern fields so that cotton and tobacco would be cheap to city whites wanting clothes and cigars.
It is harder to imagine a debt owed to members of the race that committed those horrors. And indeed my countryside was an overwhelmingly white one. A few thousand freed slaves started African American farming settlements in Kansas, one of which still survives, but most went to urban centers farth
er north. Around the same time, the federal government was killing and forcibly driving indigenous tribes to “Indian Territory,” the border of which was fifty miles south of my family’s land. A lot of Mexican American people settled throughout the state due to the cattle drives from Texas. But during the twentieth century, most of the state population was of European descent.
We thus benefited from our skin color in ways that are hard to perceive by three white people working a field together, no other human being, town, or structure in sight to the horizon—a complicated mix of privilege and disadvantage. I don’t know what, if anything, is owed to that version of the countryside. I do know that, mostly neglected by state and federal power centers, much of it is now economically dead and abandoned or under the thumb of seed corporations, natural gas corporations, and factory farms.
Government programs pop up to offer financial incentives for businesses and homeowners to stay in or move to rural America, but they can’t prevent infrastructure costs from rising when populations decline or home values from going down and, with them, local tax revenues and the schools they funded.
When I was a kid, the United States was a few decades away from reckoning with the reality that the next generation would be worse off, not better off, than the one before it. But my community had been facing dwindling odds for generations. They knew that children like me likely wouldn’t and shouldn’t aim for life on a farm. Few country kids were pressured to keep a farm going.
Well ahead of middle-class America, for all my family’s emphasis on hard work, on some level we’d done away with the idea that it always paid off. Being as we got up before dawn to do chores and didn’t quit until after dark, it was plain that the problem with our outcomes wasn’t lack of hard work. The problem was with commodities markets, with big business, with Wall Street—things so far away and impenetrable to us that all we could do was shake our heads, hate the government, and get the combine into the shed before it started to hail.
We didn’t know much about the policies and politics that were changing our environment and the food chain. We were proud that, from the exact geographic center of our country, we raised the wheat, the beef, the pork that got shipped around the world. Living in a relatively remote area, our work feeding strangers was our sole sense of connection to places we had never been. It was not, for us, a perceived political or even cultural identity but a way of life.
What it means to be “country,” though, has changed in the few decades of my lifetime, I think, from an experience to a brand cultivated by conservative forces. Once, when I was about thirty, I saw a boy from a small town wearing a T-shirt that read PRO GOD, PRO GUNS, PRO LIFE. I was shocked. In my experience, there was no evangelism about my family’s Catholic faith in the 1980s and little overt cross-pollination between our church and our politics. There was, that I can recall, no resentment toward people in cities with more formal education and money. I’m suspicious when I see these tropes trotted out proudly to represent the rural, working-class experience, often by people who have things my family never could have afforded.
I’d never heard of Carhartt, for instance, the popular work-wear brand sometimes worn as a class-conscious fashion statement, until I was well into adulthood. My choring coveralls were twenty years old with a big corduroy collar and holes in the lining, and I slopped the hogs while wearing old tennis shoes as often as I did in boots.
Grandpa Arnie’s trucks were small Toyotas bought used, not big Fords or Chevrolets jacked up a foot above big tires to look tough. Those trucks tend to look too clean for a machine that’s done any work. The big flags flying off the back of them would’ve scared our cattle. The people who drive them often live in suburbs and have big, clean garages full of all-terrain vehicles that they call “toys” next to a row of shiny helmets, a very good option I didn’t have as I drove three-wheelers from one pasture to another with buckets of feed.
Someone could have gone without beer for a week to buy a helmet. It was culture and lack of education as much as it was empty bank accounts that explained many of our habits. I’m not saying our way of country living was right. But I can tell you that Grandpa Arnie would have chuckled at a man with a cattle guard on the front of his truck driving to and from an office job.
He would have laughed, too, about designer jeans yellowed with a wash meant to evoke the dirt that was under his fingernails or the “shabby chic” decorating trend of new furniture meant to look like it had weathered decades in our barn. My family found stuff like that funny rather than offensive, maybe because it was so poorly executed. When affluent urban men in plaid flannel shirts let their hair grow wild and unkempt across their face and necks to affect a laborer’s style for doing laptop work in coffee shops, I think of my dad immaculately trimming his beard every morning before dawn to work on a construction site. The men closest to me took meticulous care with their appearance whenever they had the chance.
Mom, too, presented herself like her main job was to be photographed, when it was more likely to sort the inventory in the stockroom of a retail store. Her outfits were ensembles cobbled together from Wichita mall sale racks, but she always managed to look stylish. My favorite was a champagne-colored silk pantsuit that was cut loose and baggy. She wore it with a scarf that had big, lush roses on it like the satiny wallpaper she had glued and smoothed across our hallway. She had married a farm boy but had no interest in plaid shirts.
After she recovered from the hard delivery of her second child, Mom was relieved to get back to work in Wichita. She’d load Matt and me into her 1982 AMC Spirit to take us to the babysitter, stopping to fill up the gas tank and send me inside with some cash for five dollars’ worth of unleaded and a pack of Marlboro Lights. If Dad’s construction site was in town, sometimes Matt and I rode to the babysitter on the torn tapestry of his pickup seats and went to a McDonald’s drive-through just as the sun was coming up—a treat since we lived so far from restaurants and fast food. I remember the first time I saw a pizza box, brought home for dinner from a family-run joint in Cheney when I was in second or third grade.
For me, country was not a look, a style, or even a conscious attitude but a physical place, its experience defined by distance from the forces of culture that would commodify it. That place meant long stretches of near-solitude broken up by long drives on highways to enter society and then exit again.
Our situation was different from that of people living in the farthest rural stretches of, say, western Kansas. That proximity heightened my awareness of the contrast between country and city while allowing me to feel at ease in both. We lived in quiet but could access opportunity with a forty-minute drive.
Dad liked it that way. Owning a small bit of the countryside brought him a deep satisfaction. The state had seized some of his dad’s farmland through eminent domain in the 1960s to dig the reservoir and move water east in underground tunnels for the people of Wichita. Sometimes Dad would park his truck on the shoulder of the two-lane blacktop that ran along the lake dam and take Matt and me up the long, steep concrete steps to look at what would have been his and then our small inheritance, now literally underwater. We couldn’t use the water ourselves; it was for Wichitans to access by turning on a faucet. We thus had dug a private well right next to a giant reservoir on what once was our land. It’s an old story: pushing poor rural communities out of the way to tap natural resources for cities.
Witnessing this as a child had affected Dad deeply, and he shared Grandpa Arnie’s attitude toward the value of land: “They don’t make any more of it.” He had plans to buy the bit of land north of the house and build an addition when Matt and I were older and needed more room.
Mom was less sure of these plans.
Some evenings, I’d watch her curl and tease her dark hair at the vanity mirror that my dad had built next to their master-suite bathroom. She smelled of hair spray and Calvin Klein Obsession perfume. She left in the darkness and turned her
car wheels from our dirt road onto the highway for Wichita.
Dad would say to Mom, “Ever since you started running around with those girls at work, you’re never home. Those girls aren’t married.”
“I’m going out,” Mom growled.
While she was gone, Dad sometimes cried thinking about what she might be doing “in town,” which is what you call it when you’re country and someone has gone grocery shopping or to the bank.
When Mom went to a George Strait concert at the small Cowboy Club in Wichita, when George was newly famous, Dad sat at the stereo next to our brick fireplace, listening to a radio broadcast of the show on a country station. George would pick a woman from the audience to join him on stage, the man on the radio said. Dad held his breath, worried that Mom would be picked and swept away by a handsome celebrity in tight Wranglers and a cowboy hat. The men I knew more often wore ball caps stained through by the salt off their foreheads. Dad didn’t even like country music. Too sad, he said.
When she wasn’t in Wichita working or going out with girlfriends, Mom had one good use for the country: moneymaking schemes. Some rural women didn’t get to town often, so knocking on their doors with a product to sell was a good bet. This was before the Internet and online shopping, of course. Matt and I rode in Mom’s car as she drove far past the county line to peddle Avon cosmetics or a mail-order service that dipped baby shoes in precious metals as keepsakes. I’d sort her inventory or product samples in the front seat while Matt sat in the back with toys.
An Eagles tape would stop playing when she pulled the keys out of her rusted little car. She would walk up a gravel driveway in high heels, and the woman who answered would ask if we were the family that had the firecracker stand by the lake last July.
My mother loved country music but didn’t wear boots. She didn’t announce who she was or give a shit what society thought of it. But whether you’re a farmer in a field or a young mother opening a heavy car door against the Kansas wind, that’s about as country as it gets: moving back and forth across the earth to catch a little opportunity.