Wendell Berry wrote “A Native Hill” in 1968 and it serves as a terrific way to start our class readings about the self and community. He lives in Port Royal, Kentucky, and has for many years been Kentucky’s conscience. In this early essay on who he is and why he so identifies with the comings and goings on his farm, he warned us: “We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . .” This turns the world upside down for us Kentuckians. What I’ve observed as I grew up in Kentucky is that it is a very conservative state; people often think of themselves first (both as individuals and as members of a close-knit family) and others – especially strangers – come second. Even though Kentucky is one of the poorest states in the nation, we still cannot gather the courage to commit to public funding for education, healthcare or public safety. The will to use public funding for a common good is still lacking. Wendell Berry does not call for increased government funding, but he does see the need for individuals to have the courage to think bigger than themselves – to think about the consequences of the rape of a mountain for coal or the ravaging of a river valley’s soil for tobacco. He urges us, in this essay, to give sustained attention to something in particular, something small, that represents something larger than ourselves.
For me, it was not a “native hill” but Dry Run Creek that formed my love of the country and its life rhythms. Often sluggish but susceptible to flooding in the spring, Dry Run meandered along the northern and western boundary of my family farm in Scott County. Our house, built originally in the 18th century, sat on the crest of a hill overlooking the iron-and-wood bridge that crossed the creek to reach US 25. The old ford was just north of the bridge and the hard bed of the creek there was where my pony decided one summer day to roll and get me off rather than practice jumping for the Scott County Fair Horseshow. The creek fed the roots of huge sycamore trees along its banks and my brother built us a treehouse in one of the bigger trees on a small island. I loved following the creek bed, finding crawdads and tadpoles along the way. The limestone rocks cracking against each other as I waded along and shoved the thick algae aside with my shins. The semi-wild Angus cattle didn’t mind sharing the cool shade with me and my sisters. Hot summer days meant swimming parties and homemade boat races. In the winter, the creek often froze over and we would take a broom down each day to keep the surface smooth for ice skating parties. My older brother would skate wildly in a courageous effort to win at hockey against our cousins. As we grew older, the creek grew more and more mossy – more polluted than was safe even for wading - and we were warned not to go anymore. My baby brother grew up knowing the creek was unsafe. The creek levels dropped off as the farms north of us used the spring water for irrigation, and the toxic run-off killed the catfish and tadpoles in our creek. Nobody came anymore to sit on the stone wall and fish or go frog-gigging. I left for college and my parents sold the farm. I live in the suburbs now and my kids didn’t play outside much at all growing up here. The traffic is dangerous and the lawns around us mostly belongs to somebody else and are mostly off-limits. My kids’ growing-up years could have been in a suburb anywhere in the US. My early years in rural Scott County with a large extended family as close friends is only a story to tell my children – and the creek still runs to the Elkhorn River with its poisonous chemicals freshly applied every year by the farmers of Scott County who can’t imagine the creek any other way.
One of Bella Yan’s favorite places in Second Life is the Center for Water Studies, and one of her favorite friends is Delia Lake who runs it. The Center is an educational and recreational build in SL “dedicated to increasing the appreciation and understanding of water habitats. We hope that we can all use what we learn about water habitats in SL to better care for our precious water resources in RL [real life]. Degraded water systems are a serious threat to human health in many RL lands.” When you’re ready to explore someplace great in SL, go to http://slurl.com/secondlife/Better%20World/45/25/22.
