gone. Four or five of the trees with woodpecker nest cavities were saved. They were ugly and gnarled, stark against the sky. Around them the land was freshly disked, plowed into wide beds and replanted in rows of slash, a quick-growing “improved” pine.
Across the clearcut, a third of a mile away, I could see our rural, red-brick school that would soon no longer be a school if our county school board had its way. This time it was not forest we were trying to save.
“Don’t Waste Taxpayer Money,” our sign, the one my son was helping erect, said. “Vote No to School Closings.” It was two weeks before the county referendum.
What we learned soon after arriving home was that in order to fund a brand-new elementary school in the county seat, a school board almost a decade before had agreed to close two rural schools, one, Altamaha Elementary, eight miles north, the other, Fourth District Elementary, fifteen miles south. Those facilities were obsolete and hadn’t been maintained. Altamaha’s roof leaked and the windows needed replacing. Entrance ramps had deteriorated and classroom walls were faded and smudged. For years the threat of the closure loomed. Now the time had come to let go of them.
Altamaha is a rural school of about 250 children, named after the wide, chocolate-milk river a few miles away. We have enough students for about two classrooms per grade, up to fifth; Silas is in third.
Altamaha has special meaning to my family. My mother went to school there, as did most of our neighbors in Spring Branch Community. Uncle Percy was a fourth grader the year the school was built, 1936.
It’s a pretty little school. The main buildings are deep-red brick, flanked by white-painted additions: a cafeteria, an art room, a gymnasium, kindergarten mobile units, two playgrounds. The older children’s playground has a track and a baseball diamond, a set of swings and a long slide. The little ones have a playhouse and a merry-go-round.
The school has a particular deep-pine smell, the smell of local history, that overwhelms me every time I enter its wide dim hall. This is the same smell my mother studied in, a fragrance that transported her back to a wide-eyed, drag-footed little girl when she came to eat with Silas on Grandparents Day.
“It hasn’t changed a bit,” she said.
Of course it has, but what hasn’t altered is that the school defines the community. The teachers know students by name; they know their parents and grandparents. After school the front lot is Grand Central Station—clay instead of asphalt—with farmers in pickup trucks fetching grandchildren and mamas milling around their vans, talking, and the uncle who’s out of work retrieving his nephew and the nephew proud to be seen in his uncle’s lipstick-red Camaro. Not to mention children yelling out the windows of the three yellow buses that are loading.
Down the road at the corner, there’s a gas station and convenience store. The storekeeper, Terry, used to own a mastiff named Rocky, who loved to visit the school. When the dog showed up, the principal, Ms. Smith, would put him out and close the front door, then call Terry.
“He wants an education,” Terry would say.
The principal ousted Rocky again one day, but the pre-kindergarten class was on the playground, so the dog lingered with them, craving their delight. He discovered, by following some tickled third-graders to class, that even if the front doors were closed, the back ones might not be. The principal heard the ruckus, hauled Rocky out again, and called Terry. Before the owner arrived, Ms. Smith lettered a certificate of graduation for the dog, which she presented to Terry, who laughed until he cried.
On certain days, Johnny Jordan would come by the school peddling cabbages, cucumbers, onions, collards. Off-duty teachers would slip out to buy vegetables from the back of his truck, because Johnny piled them high, a heavy sack of carrots for a dollar. Johnny battled cancer a few years ago. He had no insurance, but teachers took up collections for him. Once he was well, he wrote each person who contributed a thank-you.
The school is not all good. Our state is one of the last bastions of corporal punishment, and early on I had to visit the principal over the matter. “I haven’t raised my son using physical punishment,” I told Ms. Smith. “Likely he will never be sent to your office. Should he be, however, he may not be hit.”
She nodded. She and I had a lot in common; she gardened and liked the outdoors. “We would never spank a child against a parent’s wishes. But most parents want their children spanked if they get in trouble. Sometimes the child gets another spanking at home.”
“They don’t understand there are better ways to parent,” I said tersely.
There are other matters of educational philosophy and practice that I disagree with. Field trips aren’t allowed, for reasons of safety. Class treats are mostly full of sugar and artificial colors. Sometimes bullying goes unnoticed or unchecked by adults; disputes are not so much resolved as the probable offenders punished. The curriculum lacks art and music. But the school is serious about education, and it is small, close-knit, and nearby. I don’t have to worry about my child there.
One day I read aloud to my nephew Carlin’s pre-kindergarten class a story about a king. I paused to explain that in our country we have a president instead of a king. “Does anybody know who the president is?” I asked.
An elfin boy raised his hand. “Ms. Smith?” he asked.
Then Carlin spoke up. “I know who the president is,” he said. “God.”
I want a school like Altamaha for Silas.
For the past century, rural places have steadily bled people, mostly to big cities, where they migrate to find work. The falling apart of rural communities intensified during World War II. To rebuild our war-broken country, an advertising campaign was launched to entice rural people away from the farms to the cities. Industrial capitalism needed a workforce, and what it promised in return was certain prosperity. Jobs were plentiful in the city, and factory labor was much easier than the hardscrabble life of a farm. To leave the farm was as much an act of patriotism as a service to self.
The ad campaign worked. There ensued a mass exodus of rural people to the cities, looking for a better life, and this movement has not stopped. Now, four-fifths of the people in the United States live in urban areas.
Across the country, you see evidence of this “hollowing out” of rural America—abandoned small farms, ghost towns, country stores with dark windows. Rural places have lost their intellectuals, thinkers, organizers, leaders, and artists, along with the children of these people. In the wake of this loss, rural locales have suffered a loss of imagination that has led to a cultural poverty.
Recent decades have witnessed a new agrarianism, defined by Eric T. Freyfogle in his anthology, The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life, as a reinvigoration of ties to the land. Evidence of this is found not only in the trickling resettlement of rural farmlands, but also in watershed restoration groups, native plant societies, and community-supported agriculture.
We do not want to confuse rural reinhabitation with urban sprawl. Being in a country place while remaining connected to a city for work and entertainment, and demanding urban amenities in the country, is not a rural life. This simply increases urban areas.
Even now, knowing that we must rebuild rural landscapes and communities, not by destroying more wild places to build homes but by moving into the abandoned places,
