Change Comes to the Shire

 

Change Comes to the Shire

Revisiting home off Highway 61.

By Rod Dreher,  December 18, 2008 These days, when I go down to visit my folks in rural south Louisiana, I feel a bit like Frodo returned to the Shire after his quest, finding that its pastoral nature had been defiled by industrialization. Progress is coming to West Feliciana Parish, a hilly, sparsely populated idyll on the Mississippi River north of Baton Rouge, whether people like it or not. What I can’t get straight in my mind is whether I have a right to an opinion on the matter.

For a couple of years now, the state’s bulldozers have been leveling the trees and fencerows along Highway 61, making way for the roadway’s expansion. The landscape I grew up with is gone. Yet it’s also true that my landscape was not my father’s. He grew up in a cottage on top of a hill overlooking Highway 61. He remembers standing on its shoulder as a boy, waving his flag as Mrs. Roosevelt’s caravan passed by on what was then a gravel road. As a student on vacation in the 1950s, he got a job working the road crew that blacktopped 61. And now, at the end of his life, he’s watching it all change again.

It would fit my crunchy-con, sense-of-place nostalgia nicely if the family patriarch railed against the dozers and the forces of Progress. Actually, he’s fine with it. He hopes they’ll build a Wal-Mart. He’s tired of having to drive 20 miles to the nearest Wal-Mart to buy things you can’t get in St. Francisville, the nearby town. My mom would like to have a good place locally to buy groceries, instead of having to drive, yes, to the Wal-Mart Supercenter. And wouldn’t it be nice, my mom says, to have more stores to shop at than the gift boutiques that cater to the tourist trade?

I am congenitally opposed to Wal-mart and all its pomps and works, but if I lived in St. Francisville instead of Dallas, where I can easily obtain the freshest vegetables and the highest quality meat, where would I stand on the matter? It’s easy to admire the simple pleasures of country life while standing in the bright shiny gleam of Whole Foods’ fruits and vegetables, beaming like Christmas ornaments. The view is different standing in the comparatively shabby produce aisles back home (trust me on this one).

My dad and his friends can’t figure out why the town of St. Francisville, six miles north of Starhill, their one-stoplight hamlet, turned down the big bridge spanning the Misssissippi now going up in their part of the parish. “It’s going to kill business in town,” said my dad, not altogether ruefully, as the commerce he predicts will bypass St. Francisville will benefit Starhill.

The answer, I suppose, is that putting a major thoroughfare too close to the old town would all but destroy its historic Old South character. The preservationists in town have been death on the subject of the bridge and Wal-Mart, I’m told, and I don’t fault them one smidge. If it hadn’t been for the haute bourgeois ladies of the Historical Society, the town would have lost more of its architectural heritage in the last century than it did.


At the same time, it must be acknowledged that many of these folks are better off financially than most in the parish, and might not appreciate the desire for good jobs and a more diverse economy. This reality violates the stereotypical notion that the well-off are the exploiters of the land, auctioning off the people’s land and traditions for filthy lucre. As often as not, members of the privileged class are the ones who oppose Progress, while the middle and working classes think those empty pastures would be improved by the presence of a strip mall. Me, I grew up nursing a prejudice against the “Hysterical Society” for fussing over old houses and buildings that nobody cared about but tourists. Now, though, if I lived in my hometown, I’d be as hysterically historical-minded as they, and on the front lines with them.

But that’s just the point: I don’t live there. When I was a young man, I chose not to share my life and my fate with the people of the parish. My life, I decided, was elsewhere. With the exception of a winter season in the 1990s, I’ve been a stranger to that place since I was 16 years old, only showing up for a few days at a time as a visitor. All my family are there, though, and I own land there. Perhaps I will settle there one day, but even if not, I can’t be indifferent to the fate of that land and its people. As Frodo said of his homeland, “I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.”

No place stands outside history, though. Any foothold we find on this earth is only relatively firm; even as we plant our feet solidly in the soil, unmovable, the earth still turns on its axis, and inexorably makes its yearly trot around the sun. Change is inevitable. The trick is to determine what form change takes.

Two of the most stalwart and admirable critics of the form change has taken in contemporary America are the agrarian Wendell Berry and the New Urbanist James Howard Kunstler. I’ve interviewed them both in the past on these matters, and found somewhat to my surprise that despite the blistering quality of their criticism, neither is against change and progress per se. Berry explained to me that he won’t sign on with the environmentalist cause, despite his strong sympathies, because environmentalists tend to disdain the legitimate claims of ordinary people to proper use of the land. For his part, Kunstler says he doesn’t oppose tearing down old houses and building new ones, only doing so thoughtlessly and cheaply, with little regard for the beauty and the humanity of the man-made environment.

There’s practical wisdom there — and an approach toward mediating conflicts between the twin necessities of progress and conservation. The decisions being made right now, and in the next couple of decades, will permanently alter the rural landscape of West Feliciana. What will it look like?


On a visit last year to my hometown, I got a look at two possible futures for St. Francisville. Travel 20 miles or so north of town up Highway 61 and you’ll come to the town of Woodville, Miss. Spend a few minutes driving around, and you’ll see a number of beautiful old houses. What you won’t see is a sign of economic life. If you drive southeast from St. Francisville about as far, you’ll come to the bustling town of Zachary, La., which is where West Feliciana folks go to shop at the Wal-Mart Supercenter. It’s a boomtown suburb of Baton Rouge, and by most accounts a nice place to live. There is no historic charm, though, and nothing distinctive about the place. It is a prime example of what Kunstler called the Geography of Nowhere.

Though clearly it’s better to be Zachary than Woodville, it’s important not to believe those are the only options on the table. To refuse change is to be a poor steward of the land and its resources for future generations. To accept change however it comes, as long as it delivers the consumer goods we want today, is a different kind of failure, but failure all the same. To create consumerist-utilitarian landscapes not worth caring about is to abdicate our responsibility to be good stewards. That’s the truth that we who fall on the conservationist side of the argument have to keep advocating for. But we have to let go of the idea of purity. We are not called to virginity, but to chastity — that is, the right use of our gifts.

It is frustrating to watch all this from afar and not take part in the fight for the future of my family’s place. Seeing it change so much, so fast — and with the coming of the bulldozers, so violently — has made me realize how much I have depended in my wanderings up and down the East Coast, and now in the Southwest, on good old West Feliciana lying behind me, “safe and comfortable,” as the hobbit put it. But no one who has declined to share the struggles, the sorrows and and the joys of the people in that or any place has a right to speak. Local people in this country have enough trouble trying to control their own destiny without outsiders interfering. And even though I was born and raised there, until and unless I take my stand back home, I’m nothing more than a sentimental outsider.