by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n The Attractions of the California Outback<\/strong><\/p>\n There are drawbacks to living in the country in general, and never more so now in rural California in particular. You country readers know all the normal trivial concerns. You must pump your own water. That means monitoring the pump and pressure tank. Your sewage is, well, your sewage. Whether you like it or not, you will eventually master cesspools, septic tanks, leach lines \u2014 and gophers, grease, roots (and everything from visitors\u2019 flushed children\u2019s toys to tampons). At fifty, I gave up fixing my own clogged lines and tried calling the septic service.<\/p>\n At night, you are on your own. (Just last night, copper thieves returned and stole again the conduit from my 15-horsepower ag pump, which had just been replaced after the last theft). But how odd to say that in 2012, as if it is 1890. At dusk, you sort of batten down the hatches against the small nocturnal stuff, like the intrusive coyotes who creep into the driveway. Or you watch for the occasional motorist who runs out of gas, sees a night light, and tries to bang on your gate at 1:00 a.m. (N.B.: People who bang on gates at 1:00 a.m. usually do not belong out on the road at 1:00 a.m. and want more than gas).<\/p>\n The \u201cbig stuff\u201d: well, that\u2019s a different story altogether in the age of these copper wire thieves, meth labs, illegal immigration, and gangbangers. The outback is to California\u2019s criminal what the back nine is to coastal golfers. Most of us cannot rely much on the \u201csheriff\u201d (I wish the \u201cConstable\u201d Iver Johannson from the 1950s was still alive, who kept things quiet out here), and assume the degree to which we will survive a rare break-in hinges on the degree to which we have sharp-toothed dogs and access (as in quick access) to firearms. So at dark, gates are locked, dogs are out, and motion lights come on, like the medieval city gate bolted shut at dusk. Read Aeneas Tacticus for theories of defending your walls.<\/p>\n Then there are the \u201cneighbors\u201d and \u201cassociates.\u201d I don\u2019t mean the farmers whose ancestors reclaimed the ground from scrub in the 1880s and still man the barricades, so to speak. But a certain different sort, who likes the rural space mostly because one can do whatever one wishes with veritable impunity. That \u201cwhatever\u201d usually means something lawless. As far as the misdemeanors, of course, who sweats them (e.g., nearby packs of pit bulls without shots or licenses, illegal trailer parks, outhouses popping up again as if it were 1920, dumping trash on the roadside in lieu of paying for garbage pickup, shooting guns behind the shed without knowledge that .22 long rifle bullets travel quite a distance, traveling fencers of stolen goods [“Hey, I’ll give you a good deal on a hydraulic ram”], etc.)?<\/p>\n But there are more serious miscreants who migrate outside the city to build drug labs, grow pot, run crack houses, or just visit at night to shoot up things, beat up their girlfriends without worry about the neighbors, or throw out fellow gangbangers into peach orchards rather than lighted city street corners. Over the years, I have seen all of the above in these environs.<\/p>\n Living in the countryside of California has become sort of a gamble. Stop signs do not mean \u201cStop!\u201d any more out here in rural California, but \u201cKinda Slow Down.\u201d I\u2019ve seen dozens of motorists run them.<\/p>\n In politically-incorrect fashion, these days I just assume there are about two or three million rural Californians who drive but have learned to do so only very recently and pilot used huge (cheap) and dangerous gas-guzzlers. At some point, the odds run out and you have a rendezvous with one. They do not speak or read English well, if at all, and often have no (official) driver\u2019s license, no insurance, no registration, and no exact knowledge of US traffic laws (I know all this politically insensitive information because five drivers have ended up in my vineyard, fled, and left their wrecked cars behind). So the navigating of rural California intersections about 6:00 p.m. when the sun sets, especially on a Friday or Saturday night, is a bit like Russian roulette. When I drive home on a Thursday or Friday evening from Palo Alto, coming off I-5 onto Manning Avenue, I expect at least to see one stop sign \u201cignored\u201d \u2014 and am usually not disappointed.<\/p>\n I could go on, so where is the punch line of why anyone would stay out here? As one ages, one asks that question more and more.<\/p>\n Now, Wait a Minute \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n The Roman lyric poet Horace wrote a fantasy satire about the urban mouse (urbanus mus<\/em>) and his rural counterpart (rusticus mus<\/em>), a morality tale about clearing your head from the flotsam and jetsam that ultimately don\u2019t matter. Junvenal\u2019s\u00a0Third Satire<\/em>\u00a0too is a rant about the urban disease, the noise, and the crowds. In fact, the entire genre of pastoralism, from Theocritus onward, is a sort of romance of what was lost by moving to town, however contrived and artificial becomes the metered poetry.<\/p>\n The agrarian tradition from Hesiod to\u00a0I\u2019ll Take My Stand<\/em>\u00a0by the \u201ctwelve southern agrarians\u201d has always made the argument that farming, the country, rural life in general, is the fabric of civilization. I tried to suggest that too in\u00a0The Other Greeks<\/em>,\u00a0Fields Without Dreams<\/em>, and\u00a0The Land Was Everything<\/em>. But here I\u2019m not arguing for either political utility or moral guidance from the land.<\/p>\n Autonomy is a reason to live out here. In the old days I used to dream of the promised day when the nearby town\u2019s sewage and water might send a line this way, or perhaps the gas company might install a lateral that would end the need for the ugly propane tank. Not now.<\/p>\n In short, I am not so confident of today\u2019s unionized city employee to guarantee steady water, gas, or sewage service as I was forty years ago (e.g., the local town\u2019s manhole cover plates were recently stolen by its own city workers). I\u2019d prefer to do it myself. My fears of high speed rail (the first rail leg to Charles Manson\u2019s home in Corcoran is routed about eight miles from here) are not just the waste, the destruction of farmland, spiraling costs, and probable low ridership, but the specter of text-messaging unionized drivers at the helm (cf. the light rail wreck in Los Angeles). I\u2019m not a survivalist nut, but just prefer to curb as much as possible reliance on what used to be unimpeachable utilities. (But when the power goes out, I\u2019ve noticed that with an outdoor grill, fireplace, a well, and a hand pump providing plenty of water for the toilets, one can survive a few hours in ease without electricity.)<\/p>\n It\u2019s still quiet and not so bright out here. There are no spats between neighbors over drifting leaves, no glaring city lights, no screaming domestic arguments, no 3:00 a.m. party next door. I don\u2019t know whether listening to birds rather than people is healthier or not, but I feel a lot better writing while watching a Cooper\u2019s hawk build a nest in my redwood tree than listening to Stanford students during the week talk next to me at the campus coffee shops (\u201cyou know, like, uh, hello, whatever, cool, etc.\u201d)<\/p>\n I can still monitor the day by the direction of the wind, the speed by which the clouds pass, the dew in the morning, the frost or absence of it in the early evening. I note spring by plum blossom time, gopher mounds popping up everywhere, doves breaking into the sheds to build nests, and the sprouting of weeds in the vineyard. All that might sound a bit artificial, given that my livelihood no longer rests, as it once did, on whether the frost takes the grape crop, but one does what one can in this age.<\/p>\n I like the human dinosaurs I still occasionally bump into. They are mostly gone from the scene, but every once in a while you cross paths with the caterpillar mechanic, the orchard topper, and the pipeline installer who never quite got on the modern bus and took a \u201cdifferent\u201d path so to speak. They also talk differently and look at the world as if they expect it to run like it did in 1961. They are independent sorts, these in their late sixties and beyond. The only other time I see them is on visits to the cemetery when I walk among the graves and usually am startled into muttering to myself something like: \u201cMy god, I had no idea that old Clarence Anderson is in here,\u201d as I see a familiar name from my childhood on the headstone at my feet.<\/p>\n Hiding out is not to be despised. Even when strangers drive in you can be out in the shed or barn or on an alleyway. It\u2019s certainly not like being in the living room in a suburb when someone knocks on the front door. That safety valve eliminates all sorts of sales people, proselytizers, and strangers who just want \u201cto talk.\u201d (And rural salesmen in general are a weirder, more interesting sort, and their wares likewise occasionally odd, from snap-on tools to a year\u2019s supply of frozen steaks.) Rural life is close enough to town for convenience and the avoidance of hermitage, but not so close as to be easily accessed.<\/p>\n I like dogs. And they are much more easily raised, fed, and their waste taken care of out in the country, and outside the house. Ditto cats. I think I have three, but don\u2019t really know, since two, three, four or more turn up at feeding time in the morning. The dogs take care of themselves, and to the degree they chew on birds, cottontails, and gophers as relish to their dog food, I\u2019m fine with it. I suppose the raw, uncooked meat, ears and all, is better for them than the processed dry and canned supplements.<\/p>\n Out here is also a refuge for a few hours per week from the nonsense of the modern age, the lectures to buy a Volt from the non-car owning Steven Chu, the calls for civility from \u201cpunish our enemies\u201d Barack Obama, the warning about carbon footprints from private-jetting Al Gore, our \u201cdownright mean country\u201d bookended with Costa del Sol, Aspen, and Vail, the \u201ctwo Americas\u201d paralleled with \u201cJohn\u2019s Room,\u201d the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0editorials berating the 1% coupled with a $24 million payout to its own departing CEO. How pleasant to be far distant from that bunch, and their nonstop scolding, whining, and lecturing that serves as a pathetic projection of their own elite tastes and guilty desires.<\/p>\n One final thought. As we age (I\u2019m 58), the conventional wisdom is to \u201cdownsize.\u201d Sell the large house. Move into a condo. Travel more. Give up the lawn mower and chainsaw. Relax.<\/p>\n I prefer the opposite. Keep busier \u2014 more limbs to prune, add some more lawn, expect to spend three weeks hauling out leaves, and each spring to cut up a huge fallen oak or liquid amber limb. I saw that with my grandfather. At 80, his tasks multiplied while his ability to meet them diminished. If farming 120 acres was a challenge at 50 for him, mowing just a fifth of his lawn was even more so at 86. If the house I live in seemed from pictures in pristine condition at 60 (1930), when he was 40, it aged into the house on the hill in Psycho at 100 (1970) when he was 80. Still, he got up every day to do what he could, until he finally just ran out of gas, and one morning did not wake up. Living in the country ensures that the need to work keeps expanding as you diminish.<\/p>\n All this helps to adopt a similar outlook about America, not to tolerate the acceptance of a shrinking world commensurate with your own decline. I\u2019d prefer America to take on ever more \u2014 pay down the debt, run surpluses in five \u2014 not fifty \u2014 years, build more dams and freeways, drill anywhere there is recoverable oil, beef up the military, require citizens to do more, not less for themselves, even as the bowing, apologizing, qualifying, sermonizing, editorializing, and nearly nonstop whining president seems to welcome our senility and wishes to retire the US into a sort of permanent European condo with lounges on the tiny sixth-floor balcony.<\/p>\n Non hic porcus<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u00a92012 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The Attractions of the California Outback There are drawbacks to living in the country in general, and never more so now in rural California in particular.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[16],"tags":[1014,1057,405,213,219],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-ed","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8327,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-drought-california-apocalypto\/","url_meta":{"origin":881,"position":0},"title":"The Drought: California Apocalypto","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 7, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media The proverbial thin veneer of civilization has never been thinner in California, as if nature has conspired to create even greater chaos than what man here has already wrought. What follows below was a fairly typical seven-day period in the land of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Popular Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Popular Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/popular-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Gov. Jerry Brown, center, answers a question concerning the executive order he signed requiring the state water board to implement measures in cities and towns to cut water usage by 25 percent compared with 2013 levels, at Echo Summit, Calif., Wednesday, April 1, 2015. (AP Photo\/Rich Pedroncelli)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/jerry_brown_4-5-15-1-500x343.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1998,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-california-mordida\/","url_meta":{"origin":881,"position":1},"title":"The California Mordida","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 14, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services California now works on the principle of the\u00a0mordida, or \"bite.\" Its government assumes that it can take something extra from residents for the privilege of living in their special state. Gov. Jerry Brown made that assumption explicit in his latest back-and-forth with Texas\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":407,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bankrupt-california\/","url_meta":{"origin":881,"position":2},"title":"Bankrupt California","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online I\u00a0thought of my fellow Californian Energy Secretary Steven Chu last week, when I paid $4.89 a gallon in Gilroy for regular gas \u2014 and had to wait in line to get it. The customers were in near revolt, but I wondered against what\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7022,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/lets-save-california-now\/","url_meta":{"origin":881,"position":3},"title":"Let’s Save California Now!","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 18, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 Just a handful of legislative acts might still save California. Here are 12 brief examples: 1.\u00a0The Hetch Hetchy Smelt and Salmon Act This so-called \u201cSkip a Shower, Save a Smelt Act\u201d would transfer control of the\u00a0Hetch Hetchy reservoir\u00a0releases from the San Francisco Public Utilities\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6908,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-rural-way\/","url_meta":{"origin":881,"position":4},"title":"The Rural Way","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 13, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 Hard physical work is still a requisite for a sound outlook on an ever more crazy world. I ride a bike; but such exercise is not quite the same, given that the achievement of doing 35 miles is therapeutic for the body and mind,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Retrospective"","block_context":{"text":"Retrospective","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/retrospective\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/California_Farm_-_geograph.org_.uk_-_388051-300x200.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9692,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/its-still-a-mad-mad-california\/","url_meta":{"origin":881,"position":5},"title":"It\u2019s Still a Mad, Mad California","author":"Megan Ring","date":"January 4, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Coastal elites set rules for others, exempt themselves, and tolerate rampant lawlessness from illegal aliens. One reason for the emergence of outsider Donald Trump is the old outrage that elites seldom experience the consequences of their own ideologically driven agendas. Hypocrisy, when coupled with\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=881"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":882,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881\/revisions\/882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}