In western Kansas one can see for miles. Grain elevators stick out of the earth like push pins on a map marking all the places I have been. My parents were rooted to that place, a farming community in central Kansas. My mother was the daughter of a farmer and a schoolteacher whose ancestors had immigrated to rural Kansas from Germany. Generations had worked the land, gotten married, had children whose children had children, and set down deep roots in the dirt that they plowed. My father a native of Seattle, with no desire to return to the big city, stayed in Kansas upon leaving the army after Vietnam and marrying my mother. Fourteen years later they had me: their only child.
When I was little, we lived in a giant, dilapidated, old farmhouse. We had no central air or heating, and until a well was dug when I was in third grade, we ran water into a cistern using a pump and a garden hose. In the summers when it was too hot to sleep upstairs the three of us would sleep downstairs in the living room. We burned our trash in a barrel and took the rest to the dump. For years I thought this was how everyone lived.
At fourteen we moved the twenty miles into the town of LaCrosse, to my grandparent’s former home. Gone would be the summers of riding my bike through pastures and swinging in the hayloft of the barn. I cried when my parents told me we were moving. “We’ll get cable,” my mother said, trying to buy my approval. Not that my approval was needed. The summer before my freshman year of high school we loaded our belongings into cars and an old Toyota truck and moved to the house that was part of my mom’s inheritance.
For the four years of high school, I was an unhappy teenager whose only thought was of escape. I was ready to graduate by the time I was a sophomore. So, after receiving my diploma, I left behind the small rural farming community that I had grown up in for the Flint Hills region of Kansas. I sought to distance myself from my rural small-town past. I arrived at university from a town most people had never heard of. While I wasn’t necessarily pegged as a backwards country bumpkin, I also felt like I was behind in a game so many of my peers already seemed to know how to play. Going to university is a whole new ballgame for rural students. Something I quickly discovered.
However, I soon became intoxicated by everything my college town had to offer. So, even when I felt like I didn’t completely understand the game, I had fun playing along anyway. I majored in English. I fell in love with books, and the power of words. I was (and still am) a voracious reader. I started to travel more including a summer trip to England with eight other students and one of our professors. I loved rubbing elbows with the brilliant faculty members in my department. It didn’t take long for me to identify more with my university counterparts than with the rural farm families I had grown up with. By the time I graduated five years later, I didn’t want to leave.
Flash forward to the present day. More than a decade after my undergraduate graduation. Thanks to the wisdom and experience that comes with age, along with a broader worldview, I started to think more about my rural upbringing. I started to long for those days on that old farmstead of my childhood. This longing was in part put into motion by the rapid deterioration the farmstead was experiencing after being abandoned and left to the elements for multiple years. A trip to visit my childhood home in 2017 was a heartbreaking experience. However, this visit was the catalyst for me to start embracing my rural past rather trying to run away from it.
My home is filled with reminders of where I come from. The walls of my living room are full of old pictures taken with a film camera of the farmstead I spent the first fourteen years of my life on. There are pictures of the house in snow, pictures of the majestic barn (the closest thing you get to a skyscraper in rural Kansas) from the road. A picture of me as a baby with my grandpa Hagerman out in the harvest field. Grandpa in his usual overalls and long-sleeved shirt is standing in front of a combine and wheat truck holding me so that we are both facing the camera. There is a painting done by my Uncle Steve of me standing amongst knee-high weeds in front of the dilapidated old barn on the farmstead. All of these reminders of a past I had tried for years to outrun.
Our society does little to keep young people in the rural communities they grew up in. We live in a world that encourages upward mobility. Often times, the writing on the wall is all too clear for rural teens. Go to college, move to a city where jobs, opportunities, and culture are plentiful. This is referred to as the rural brain drain, and it poses a serious threat both socially and economically for rural America. As fewer and fewer college graduates remain in small towns, these rural communities become less attractive to other young graduates. The portrayal of these places also contributes to young people wishing to leave. When media portrayals of their rural communities are nothing but offensive caricatures of the actual place. When young people do not see themselves and where they come from accurately portrayed in any type of media from news to television shows, it is easy to feel a sense of embarrassment, and a desire to leave. To flee to a city somewhere that is portrayed less negatively, as less of a joke.
Over a decade ago, in an undergraduate American Nature Writing course, one of our assigned texts was Becoming Native to this Place by Wes Jackson. In this essay collection, Jackson writes not only about sustainable agricultural practices, but also about how societies encouragement of upward mobility has caused young people to leave rural communities. He explains that this idea of being constantly on the move and never really “becoming native to a place” has caused significant harm not only to rural communities, but also to the land.
The farming community in which I grew up has fallen victim to both the rural brain drain and society’s encouragement of upward mobility. Pictures of my hometown from the 1960s show a thriving downtown with multiple shops and cars lining the street. In the present day, the once thriving main street is full of empty storefronts, and only a handful of cars line the street at any given time.
Many of my family members, as well as the folks I spent much of my childhood around, are farmers or have a connection to farming and the land. They have farmed for generations, and they know no other way of life. However, it has gotten significantly harder for small family farms to continue due to the rise in factory farms and policies that seek to devalue a place only so it can be exploited. These folks who have tended to the land for so long are now having to chose whether it is worth it to continue fighting to survive or if they should pack it all in and get an office job “in town.”
All of this is easy for me to pontificate about as I write from a coffee shop in my university town, and it might even sound a bit hypocritical given I am part of the rural brain drain. I left my small hometown for college, and I never went back. However, sometimes leaving where you are from can lead to a deeper understanding. After all, as author Sarah Smarsh wrote in an article recently published by The Guardian, “We carry our backstories with us, and many who leave are eventually summoned home, whether by familial duties or an abiding affection for the complicated place that shaped them.”
I carry my backstory with me, and rather than running away from it, like a younger me tried to do for years, I have let it inform who I am. My rural background influences my writing, my teaching of Composition students at the university where I work, and the respect I have for those whose lifeblood involves working the land and growing the crops that help feed this country. My hope is that the more I write and present about my own rural upbringing and the people who live there the more we will see a switch in the way rural communities are discussed and portrayed.
The next time I leave my college town for LaCrosse, rather than trying to leave as soon as possible, I will instead make a concerted effort to listen to the stories of the people there. Pay attention to the issues affecting them. Dig into my roots and try to find a way to share the stories of a people who are often overlooked.
Lindsey’s poetry collection, Vacant Childhood, is published by Kellogg Press and can be found here.
Find out more about Lindsey on our Contributors’ Page.
(Photo: ercwttmn/flickr.com/CC-BY SA 2.0)
- Reframing My Rural Past by Lindsey Bartlett - November 3, 2022