In Praise of Country Folks (From a Suburbanite) Part 1
By Nick Sorrentino
“I can plow a field all day long I can catch catfish from dusk till dawn
We make our own whiskey and our own smoke too
Ain't too many things these old boys can't do
We grow good ole tomatoes and homemade wine
And a country boy can survive country folks can survive”
-Hank Williams Jr. from: Country Boy Can Survive
I grew up in an expanse of suburbia known as Virginia Beach. It is the largest city in Virginia and is hundreds of square miles of 7-11s, malls, high schools, and highways. This is the world I grew up in. It is a world without dear hunting, or burning barrels, or bush hoggin.” It is a world of packaged food, hour long commutes, and youth soccer games. It is the world that most middle class white (and black for that matter) Americans have lived in since World War 2.
After college I moved to Fairfax County Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC where I was once again eyebrow deep in office parks and convenience stores. Aside from the fact that I was now surrounded by civil servants instead of by career military as I had been in Virginia Beach, Northern Virginia was more of the same. The same malls. The same traffic. The same obsession with consumption.
Then one day my wife and I decided to move to Charlottesville Virginia, home of UVA, the Dave Mathews Band, and Thomas Jefferson.
We first moved to one of the few really suburban enclaves in Charlottesville. It looked like Northern Virginia, there was a Wal-Mart just down the road, but there was something different. In Charlottesville the suburbs were the exception, not the rule. There was the very compact and cosmopolitan city of Charlottesville, a couple of neighborhoods like ours on the fringes of the city, and then country, with lots and lots of woodland and pasture. Suburbanites were in the minority of the people you bumped into. Most people were either faculty or students at UVA or lived in the rural surroundings.
Two years later we moved 10 miles west of Charlottesville to a small town at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. When I rose in the morning and looked out my bedroom window, 2500 feet of mountain stared back at me. It was a fantastic place to live and it was here that I first got to know country folks.
In the suburbs people often refer to people from the mountains as “red necks” or “hill Billies.” Country folk are the one demographic group in this country that it is still OK to mock. Invariably, when suburbanites talk about country folks, there is always someone who has never spent any real time in the country, who will break into a verbal rendition of the tune from Deliverance. What these people don’t understand is that the country folks, in some ways have it made.
As a financial advisor at a bank I had the pleasure of meeting many country folks. Let me tell you right now. Though there are many country people who can’t rub two dimes together, the wealthiest people I saw at the bank were country folks. They often had acres of land handed down a few generations. They almost never had a mortgage. They almost always had stockpiles of silver coins. Their cars were usually paid for. Plus they knew how to grow their own food.
But they drove old trucks and wore clothes that lacked any designer label.
Contrast this with the lawyer and doctor types I often met with who were leveraged to the hilt and are likely to remain so until they croak.
And for those of you who have never heard the song...
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