“It was like a dream of hell, when a man finds his own name staring at him from the Devil’s ledger; like a dream of death, when he who comes as a mourner finds himself in the coffin, or as witness to a hanging, the condemned upon the scaffold.” – Thomas Wolfe

This is idleness.

It’s another Monday in Boomer, cool and rainy. I have now settled into this unemployed and isolated routine. Today I made few brief human interactions. I went to the farm down the road to purchase apples and sweet potatoes for our upcoming Thanksgiving trip to my parents’ house in Tennessee. The farmers did not have much to say in the drizzle; they pretty much deferred me to the old woman charged with selling their products while they continued their crate stacking duties. Other than that and saying a sleepy, shut-eyed good bye to Loren at 5:45 this morning, I have encountered no one today.
The rest of my day has looked quite similar to the other weekdays I have recently passed. After waking late, I exercised a little, cleaned house a little, read a little, and made lunch. This afternoon I found myself rereading Kay Hagan’s proposals on the middle class tax policy and health care, and I was again filled with pride to have worked so hard to get such a bright and capable woman elected to the US Senate. I hope she is in office long enough to enact all of her proposals.

Tomorrow I will break routine and go into Lenoir to mail out another round of résumés, help Loren’s students with their math lesson, fill the afternoon with reading at the library, then cap the day by having dinner at a graduate school friend’s house. Our friend is from India and, fortunately for us, his mother insisted that he learn to cook traditional food before he came to study in the states. He has cooked for us before and words cannot express the treat bestowed upon our palates. It will be nice to see him again. He will finish the program in December, and I am not sure where he will go next. So I am grateful for this time.

This is life in the country. I am still learning.

It’s morning in Boomer. 6:37 am. This time yesterday it was 18 degrees. It has been 16 days since election night, and exactly two weeks since the morning I returned from Raleigh. It is cold and grey here, and I am bored in this Boomer-town.

A Leveled Perspective from a Brushy Mountain Outpost

It has been a while since I updated this blog. My last entry darkly dealt with the death of my young nephew, Reagan Carmichael. It is a tragic and trying event, any death, but is all the more difficult to accept when the victim has only been on this earth for four months and eleven days. Perhaps the nature of that last blog has itself been an obstacle for my writing. Though still quit troubling, more than a year has passed and time and circumstance have created a little bit of perspective.
In the time between then and now much has changed in my life. Loren and I moved from the small town of Boone, to the rural nothing of Boomer in the eastern slopes of Appalachia. I began a career in camp and conference services, resigned from that career, and started graduate school full-time instead. I enjoyed my short-lived vocation as conference coordinator for Herring Ridge, the YMCA conference center here in Boomer; and I learned a great deal. In my charge were all the non summer camp programs of the Ridge, including team building, the environmental education program, school/church/corporate retreats, and my varied tasks ranged from recruiting, hiring, and training staff, to developing environmental ed curriculum, marketing all of our programs, managing the department’s budget, contracts and billing, and facilitating the events at our facilities. Needless to say, I had to learn all about nonprofit management in a short amount of time and I am proud of the work we did. The guests were diverse and delightful, the administration was wonderfully helpful, and the program staff was exquisite. The comradely we shared made the decision to leave a though one; but there was something about my time at Herring Ridge that felt incomplete. I certainly had an enjoyable experience, but it felt like an echo, an image of fulfilling work - not the actual thing. It was not until after I resigned and began graduate school that I was able to realize why I felt incomplete at Herring Ridge.
My first semester in the Master’s program in political science at Appalachian State University was a tough one, and the concentration in International Relations and Comparative Government funneled the 10 or so students of the program through a weeder course in IR theory. The reading load was daunting and the concepts always seemed to be above me, but it never failed to be absolutely fascinating. Whether we were debating the role of international activists in constructivist theory, feminism as an IR perspective, or the relative merits of neo-Marxism vs. post neo-Marxism, I always felt that the questions we struggled with were important and would yet prove their relevance to the ways the states interact. My own personal revelation developed subtly as I no longer felt like I was stalling. At Appalachian I felt I was on the course to my true life’s work, and not on an interesting but time consuming deviation. I felt, and still feel, happy.
I barely made it through that first semester, but after a regrettable detour through Readings and Research in American Government, I am back on track studying subjects like Human Rights and Central and Eastern Europe. The bane of the spring is doubtlessly Research Methods, but the summer will bring the half way mark to my Master’s degree and I feel urgently compelled to what comes next. I am intrigued by the inequities of the international system and have retained the youthful idealism that allows me to believe that working to bring a greater level of justice to a world that is markedly unjust is worthy of a life, my life, and any other pursuit would be hapless vanity.
And here we are, at our Brushy Mountain outpost an hour or so commute down slope from what now seems cosmopolitan by comparison, Boone. The nights here are quiet, human encounters are generally surprising, and the distance between here and ‘there’ presses against one’s senses. But the sky is vast and light plays behind clouds in ways that seem to explain the dramatic myths of the ancient Greeks. Though rural life at once generates claustrophobia and loneliness, it simultaneously reminds us in every moment of the pervasiveness of something much, much greater. And our outpost provides quit a perspective.