Homesteaders, Hicks, and Hippies

On the tiny road below my son’s home in Asheville lives a family who raises chickens and goats, plants a sizable garden in the spring, and owns an older house on which they do many of the repairs. If I stand outside in the early morning, I can hear their two roosters sounding reveille. Behind the house sits an abandoned school bus occupied by a friend. 

These folks are what Jason Strange would call “bohemian homesteaders.”

In Shelter From The Machine: Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism, Strange takes us to the hills of Eastern Kentucky and introduces us to two very different groups of back-to-the-landers, the “hicks” and the “hippies,” as some call them. Strange prefers “bohemian homesteaders” and “country homesteaders.” The former are often, but not always, new arrivals in a rural community eager to learn the skills of farming and independent living, while the latter are people who grew up in those communities and either prefer to live as did their parents and grandparents, or who lack the resources to follow a different path.

Strange, a professor at Berea College, enters into the lives of several of these families and individuals, recounting their conversations, listening closely to their stories, switching from pig roasts and visiting over beer and vodka with the country homesteaders, and attending parties and helping with various projects with the bohemians.

Here we meet Nathan Hamilton, a country homesteader who has never “set foot in a schoolhouse” or seen a doctor. He has neither a driver’s license nor a social security card. “He is thirty-nine years old, strong and energetic but no longer lean, a handsome man with dark hair and a big, dark beard and a ready laugh.” Strange also describes him as “one of the sharpest people I have ever known.” His cabin has no electricity and no running water; he use kerosene lamps for light and a foot-driven pump under the kitchen sink for washing dishes.

Virginia Webb is the bohemian homesteader counterpart of Nathan. Strange first invites readers to shake hands with this potter, beekeeper, and gardener when he joins some of Virginia’s friends who have gathered to help her work on her straw bale house. Here he talks with Cody, another bohemian homesteader, who says of the modern world, “We’ve already been taken over by artificial intelligence. They’re called corporations.”

Though Strange returns again and again to these people and others like them, Shelter From The Machine is a far-ranging examination of topics other than homesteading: corporations, the role of class in American life, reading skills, education, the meaning of work, life expectancy, anarchism. 

One gift I took from Shelter From The Machine, and other readers may experience the same sensation, is that even where I disagreed with Jason Strange’s political views—and I did, several times—he writes with such clarity and a generosity of argumentation that his words and voice invite discussion, unlike some writers who, when addressing political and cultural topics, beat their readers like a hammer to make their points. I could easily imagine Mr. Strange and I sitting at a table in the coffee shop where I am writing these words, sharing thoughts, pausing for reflection, disagreeing, and agreeing to disagree.

Because of my interest in literature and education, “Ain’t Nuthin’ in Them Books” was for me the most fascinating chapter of Shelter From the Machine. Here Strange writes of the public schools near Berea, shares his experiences as a teacher at the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, examines the differences between literacy and literate intellectuality. He points out that the fortunate kids in terms of literature and books are those who attend such schools as Phillips Exeter, or those who find in their homes and public libraries sanctuaries in which books are loved and reading is encouraged.

Periodically throughout the book, Strange argues that “class divisions are less about the unfair distribution of money and more about the unfair distribution of education.” According to Strange, their different educations and their experience with books are what cut the canyon of difference not just between a Nathan Hamilton and a Virginia Webb, but also between the rich and the middle class, and the poor. 

To an extent, I agree with Strange’s thesis. Human beings tend to be herd creatures, and we hang out with those who are most like us. Suppose the kid we grew up with in a trailer park, Billy, somehow managed to become a New York broker. Odds are that when he came back to our small town we could still have a beer and shoot the breeze. We might envy him his good fortune, but because of our common background we might also remain friends.

Yet I see another reason for the breakdown of communication between ordinary folk and those who regard themselves as their betters. We have a good number of Americans who rarely rub elbows with a mechanic or a plumber. We see this classism in the term “fly-over country,” and in the remarks of certain politicians regarding some voters. 

Books and education may indeed draw us together, but what might make a better glue would be the realization that every person we encounter—our banker, the grocery store clerk, the guy with dirt under his fingernails—is a human being worthy of respect and dignity until proven otherwise. 

In Boonville, North Carolina, where I grew up, the population then was around 600, and my father was the town physician. My siblings and I daily played with the sons and daughters of plumbers, repairmen, policemen, and farmers. My parents played bridge, attended Lions Club and church, with these same people. There was no sense of division, because we knew each other and because we respected the humanity of other people. Because of that education, to this day I often find myself more at ease conversing with a tow truck driver or a barista than with some academics I know.

Despite quarrels such as this one, Shelter From The Machine made me pause and think about what I believe, and why I believe as I do, more than any other book I have read in several years. 

Do yourself a favor and read Shelter From The Machine.