The last helper stay in the US is over. I spent two weeks on a homestead (small farm that supports one family) in Wayside, West Virginia, hosted by Sue and her daughter Ruth. They live on a remote property in the Appalachian Mountains, surrounded by trees, birds, bees, deer, clouds and the white noise of being out of cell phone and WiFi range.
It has been an eye-opener to say the least, an insight into another America. And though I had picked the place because I was dreaming of driving the Appalachian Blue Ridge mountain Highway, a road-trip of a few days, I quickly figured out I had chosen my stay on the wrong side of the mountain ridge 🙂 … and the closest place to rent a car was 1,5 hours driving away – in the wrong direction. So I’ll have to come back …. 🙂
Sue, 67 years of age, is a self-made farmer, bee-keeper, carpenter, plumber, gardener, herbalist, and medicine-woman who bought the 3-acre property many years ago (current value around 10.000 USD according to public information). Originally it was a weekend getaway from her home a few miles away. She slowly ended up spending more and more time here, so eventually made the move over and is living here full time. There was one cabin on the property, she added a second one for her daughter and a third one for the helpers she has been hosting over the years. Her daughter had been studying and living in another part of the state but came back 5 years ago to be closer to her ageing mom.
Originally Ruth, now 29, had planned to go into the army, she had signed all the paperwork, had been given her enlisting date and was packing up to go, but a serious car accident resulting in a long rehabilitation period and permanent damage to her spine intervened. She had been working in banking in the northern part of the state and after the accident started taking her religion more seriously. She was engaged but broke it off because he wasn’t following her on the religious path. When she tells the story of her decision-making process to come back home, God is very present. “I put my faith in the hands of God. I called the school here, they had a temporary job opening for 3 months and I hesitated long before taking it. I told Him He’d better make sure there was either an extension or another job for me at the end of that three months.” So she packed up and came home.
Tim, her boyfriend-slash-fiance, proposed just a few days before I arrived. đź’Ť The wedding dress had already secretly been in her closet for a few months though :). She found it in a local thrift store and couldn’t resist or pass the opportunity to get it – at 80 USD a steel! Her aunt is a decent photographer and she’ll take the pictures. A friend is into hair and makeup and will take care of that. They will be making most of the decorations themselves with whatever flowers they can find on the property and the hundreds of mason jars that Sue has been collecting over the years. The wedding will be held at the Summer camp where both she and Tim work in the summer to make extra money. Ruth works there as a caterer in summer and cooks for the 100+ kids, so she’ll also be doing the catering for her own wedding. Tim is working as a music teacher and youth counselor/pastor in his church, on top of his full-time job at the county administration. He obtained a master’s degree in religious studies to be a youth pastor (“God called me, oh yes, I had a very strong calling”). We went to the mall to get the engagement ring resized and went shopping for invitation cards. August 11th will hopefully be a sunny and radiant day!
Apart from the work in Camp Summers, Ruth works as a teacher in a small private school that belongs to the Baptist church. I learnt in the previous months that many of the thousands of churches in the US will often set up a school next to church. Private schools, with only a handful of students, under the direction of the pastor, priest, vicar, reverend or whoever is the main person at the church that the school belongs to. In total control of what your kid is learning and how these future generations will view the world. In Ruth’s case, the pastor of the Baptist Ballard church is also the director of the school that hosts about 50 students (Ruth has 4 students in her class, combining 3rd and 4th grade, the 8 and 9 year olds). He also teaches all bible classes and is the coach of most of the sport teams. The school and church were founded by his great-grandfather.
Ruth teaches the children mathematics, English, Spanish, and Science. I couldn’t discover any more subjects than these. I hope there is more … They follow the (limited) curriculum and use the specific exercise and teaching books published by a Christian publishing house for homeschooling programmes. No specific teaching degree is necessary. Anyone may teach in these private schools.
I am a bit puzzled as to what they are taught in Science class though, since the Baptist Christian church is a creationist church, believing that God created the earth less than 10.000 years ago, in 6 days. And that all rivers and mountains are equally old, and that Darwin is wrong. They don’t adhere to the theory of Evolution.
The parents sign a waiver at the beginning of the school year, allowing the teachers to discipline the children by smacking them on the hands with a ruler. The school principal is allowed to smack them on the bottom with a stick.
In school, God is everywhere, up to the exercise books where many of the examples are ‘culturally appropriate’ and the pages are adorned with verses from the bible. To exercise their writing skills the kids copy bible verses in handwriting in the evening.
Ruth and her mother Sue are strong Trump supporters. Their only source of news is Fox radio. There is no TV and only limited internet from 2 to 8 PM. So Sue used to go to bed at 8 in the evening to get up around 3 or 4 AM in order to use the internet for a few hours. Though they are not pushy, not about their Christian belief and not about their political preference, we cannot avoid that the subject sometimes comes up … West-Virginia used to be an all-democratic state, until the mid-nineties when the coal crisis hit the coal mines.
Since then the state has slid down a negative spiral – towards having the highest gun-related crime percentage, towards an appalling number of painkiller-overdose-related deaths and suicide, towards a decreasing life expectancy for the white middle class and increasing hopelessness. Coal got competition from natural gas, China was importing less coal than before, and stricter environmental rules brought the industry to its knees. This all started happening long before Obama. But somehow, he and the democratic party took the blame.
Of course it didn’t help that in all campaigning events in the state Trump would announce that he planned to open all the mines back up, and that Hilary’s proposal was a long-term more sustainable plan to invest millions into converting the region to a producer of green energy. Desperate and hopeless people want to survive. Now. Tomorrow.
So the once blue democratic state turned red, and Trump got close to 70% of the votes, giving him his largest margin of victory in the country. Hillary Clinton received 25% of the votes. West Virginia was also one of only two states where Trump won every county, the other being Oklahoma.
Each day I would make lunch for Sue. She hates indoor work, cleaning or cooking. “I am not a homemaker. Ruth does all the indoorsy stuff, I do all the outdoorsy stuff. If no one cooks for me, I just don’t eat or have a peanut butter sandwich.” She comes into Ruth’s cabin around 6 for breakfast, hangs around there during the day when she is not working outside and only goes back to her own cabin to sleep. The main reason being that (trying not to use the word hoarder) her own cabin is full of stuff so she can hardly move around or sit anywhere anymore. So we spend the rainy hours or our time together in Ruth’s tiny cabin – one room serves as living room/dining area and kitchen. In the back there is a bedroom and a tiny bathroom.
Sue is a retired nurse. Or at least … was. She used to spend her days working on the homestead all day, tending to the horse, the bees, the chickens, her vegetable garden, canning foods, mowing the lawn (with a normal small lawnmower, not the tractor type where you can sit on), cutting back the forest, and, as she describes it “sitting on the porch with ice tea, watching my bees, the horse, the vegetables, the forest.”
Recently however, she took up working again – at two jobs. Since Ruth is getting married this summer and her husband, Tim, plans to come and live on the property, one of the cabins needs to be extended to make room for the couple, and possibly children too in a near future. Sue contracted the Amish that live in the county to come do the work and we went together to the lumber store several times to order all the necessary wood and supplies. All this labour and material cost money that neither Sue nor Ruth had, so she needed to go back to work. Sue now works the late and night shifts in a nursing home for elderly, where she tends to 40 beds on her own from 2PM to 11PM five days a week. She leaves home at one and is back around midnight. She doesn’t stop to eat, so I make sure she has a good and hearty lunch before she takes off.
Additionally she takes up night shifts from 7PM to 7AM caring for a comatose young man who is being looked after by his parents at home. She has trouble staying awake on the rides home after any of these shifts. And the few hours in the morning that Sue is home, she is stressed and overwhelmed because we see the large amount of work that needs to be done and there never seem to be enough hands around or enough time.
I haven’t worked especially hard or long, and was allowed lots of time to read and quietly sit on the porch. I realise however that Sue managed to teach me quit a lot though – how to whack weed with a whacker with a blade, not a string. I learnt to repair electric fencing. I discovered I am not allergic to bees, since I got stung on the head but could still breathe after a few minutes :). I met my first ticks, learned to recognize the poisonous poison ivy and black widow spiders, the most venomous spider in North America. The venom of the black widow spider is 15 times as toxic as the venom of the prairie rattlesnake.
I learnt to accept the fact that people have no money to bring their waste to the landfill, or to pay for garbage pick-up services and that as a consequence, all waste, be it household waste, wood leftovers, roofing, tiles, plastic, … is brought to a ditch on the land and covered with wood from trimming the trees and shrubs around the property.
I learn again that for complex reasons, some people cannot let go of any belongings coming their way, be it that they bought them themselves, but in most cases, they were given to them. In the West-Virginian household this presents itself as plastic straws from McDonalds take-out ice-teas being rinsed and reused, in a heated discussion between mother and daughter when Ruth tries to round up some small items as prizes for a benefit at school. Every plastic basket with a broken handle has emotional value, every broken stick of wood can be put to use in an unclear future. Buckets of burnt out candles, boxes of small pieces of fabric, torn up dog beds, leaky gardening hoses, broken pieces of wire are kept in a shed that is already bursting at the seams, because of vague and dreamy projects in an indistinct future. We try to clear out the shed, and Ruth is hopeful that I can bring Sue to throwing away some things easier than she can, since I am not her daughter but a stranger. In the evening I need to admit defeat and can only tell Ruth that we have taken everything out of the shed, but have also put back about 99,99% of the things. Including boxes of bent and rusty nails, dried up paint and broken tools. It may be a psychological issue linked to insecurities and being unable to let go, not being able to make decisions. On the other hand .. I sometimes think it’s also linked to the poverty. There’s a heap of old tyres laying around the plot, for Sue’s Jeep, and noone in their right mind would put these back on the car. They are smoother than a baby’s cheek. But when you have a flat, and no money to buy a new tyre, there’s just only that much you can do.
But apart from all this, I discovered I can really like a person even though we strongly disagree on several (sometimes even existential and essential)Â views and values in life. I laughed so much with Ruth, just chatting away, discovering the differences between Europe and the US, talking about books and movies, cooking and friends. And at the same time, I was shocked sometimes when learning about her convictions and beliefs. Like writing to her local representative to block the “Bathroom Bill”, allowing gender-neutral toilets in public places and schools.
So I’ll try and focus more strongly on the all-day-breakfast we enjoyed at 7 in the evening at Kirk’s in Hilton, and on the movie we watched in the Ritz Theatre (showing one movie every week, once per evening, from Friday to Monday), and on the beautiful nature the state has to offer 🙂. On all the laughs we shared and the hours we spent talking. On insights gained and respect earnt.
Breek uit Jezelf 