Sunday Walks, Born Fighting...
It’s starting to feel like spring. I’m sure there’s plenty of winter yet to be had, but we’re loving these warmer days and trying to make the most of them. Lots of rain and lots to do.
Still keeping the cows fed. We bought 14 steers and heifers to add to our herd. They’re still crazy expensive. I keep thinking they can’t get any higher, but then they do. We’re hoping to add more to the farm to get stocked back up between now and spring.
We took an afternoon to fill this month’s pork shares. Amy made multiple batches of broth.
I took a rainy Thursday to run errands and take 4-wheelers and mowers to and from the shop. Any spare time this week I devoted to cleaning up and cutting up trees and limbs fallen from the hurricane to add to our woodpile. Our early focus was trees that had fallen on fences. Now we’re finally getting around to trees that had just fallen out in the fields.
This week’s highlight for me was a Sunday afternoon walk out the gravel road. Carter’s little legs had to maintain a jog in order to keep up with our slow walk, but she endured the hike with very little whining. After a chilly January, it’s nice to be outside in tolerable weather.
While feeding cows, I’ve been listening to Born Fighting by Jim Webb about the Scotch-Irish influence on the American spirit. This is one of my dad’s favorites. I read it years ago but decided to revisit it.
“And I know this is what my ancestors must’ve thought as well: another mountain and then another. Why should I stop here? And I think not only of my great-great-grandparents lying underneath my very feet, but of all the others who made me, whose lives passed through these mountains, and others just like them to the north and south. Perhaps they were brave. Perhaps they were merely desperate. But they were daredevils, not only to have shown up, but also to have had the courage to leave. On top of this mountain you can understand the pioneers creed: The cowards never started. The weak died along the way. Only the strong survived.”
“They are a force that shapes our culture more in the abstract power of emotion than through the argumentative force of law. In their insistent individualism they are not likely to put an ethnic label on themselves when they debate societal issues. Some of them don’t even know their ethnic label and some who do know don’t particularly care. They don’t go for group identity politics any more than they like to join a union. Two hundred years ago the mountains built a fierce and uncomplaining self-reliance into an already hardened people. To them joining a group and putting themselves at the mercy of someone else’s collectivist judgment makes about as much sense as letting the government take their guns. And nobody is going to get their guns. But this is who they are and where they came from.”
“In this culture’s heart beats the soul of working-class America. These are loyal Americans, sometimes to the point of mockishness. They show up to our wars. Indeed, we cannot go to war without them. They haul our goods. They grow our food. They sweat in our factories. And if they turn against you, you are going to be in a fight.”
“The Scots-Irish did not merely come to America, they became America, particularly in the South and the Ohio Valley… And the irony is that modern America has forgotten who they were and are… It’s no exaggeration to say that despite its obsession with race and ethnicity, today’s America has a hole in its understanding of its own origins.”
Have a good week.
Will