Country Life 📍

Often a lot of internet videos of homesteaders and farmers, have their properties all prettied up for the cameras. The manure piles well hidden, the mud and muck washed away, the pungent smells of life and death not lost in the transmission of the camera’s photos. 

When I was out canvassing in Plattsburgh and surrounding towns like Beekmantown and Peru, I was pretty much in the standard rural/suburbanite neighborhoods with the endless chipboard houses covered with off-white vinyl and colored sand asphalt roofs. Plastic that shows the mud and muck, UV destruction. Same old grid-tied houses, with weekly garbage hauling, flush toilets going to sewage or septic tank with the poop and paper stored for landfill disposal. Some considered by those to be modern suburban houses, others rundown old trailers. But not really homesteads with goats, hogs, sheep or cattle even if at times the tangy smell of manure hung over the air from nearby dairies which are out spreading this time of year with the corn chopped.

To be fair, the neighborhoods I was walking were walkable and suburban or rural villages. Or trailer parks. They were the places where Democrats live who have priorities besides keeping their guns and being left alone with their livestock and trash fires. Many did have wood stoves, and there was the occasional “modern” log house, and I saw actually quite a nice one out on Cumberland Head with a steel roof, still hardly the backwoods off-grid cabin I toured back in college many years ago, when people were still using lead acid batteries, compact florescents and those big old Outback Inverters with separate charger controllers, and solar was still expensive and boutique technology. I know such places exist in the Greater Plattsburgh, but I wasn’t going to visit such places in search of Democrats. Most of those places are really in the backwoods, up in hills in the remote parts of Altona, Blackbrook, Dannemora, and other towns well hidden from the road.

I get it’s New York State with the burn ban, and I was never in a real rural area. And I do know those places exist,  even if they aren’t as common as the places that fill your Zillow feed, at least until you disable that program on your phone. No everything is that typical vinyl commercial crap, sold as beautiful, colorful and sometimes sustainable plastic even when it’s not. But most of what I saw was a mixature of wealthy houses along the lake, very suburban neighborhoods, and trailer parks – which very much had the big televisions, high-speed internet, weekly trash pickup and just as much junk as the wealthy residents.

I do romanticize a lot about the nobel savage, as if most of the poor lived on homesteads without overflowing weekly trash baskets full of plastics, where houses weren’t wrapped in plastic, where processed food wrapped loaded with saturated fat and sugar in colorful packaging wasn’t the dominant form of sustenance. Places that might smell of manure or burnt plastic occasionally, but are vastly more sustainable than those with weekly trash service and unlimited coal and gas fired electricity. Where the poor eat real food, because they had no other option, as they couldn’t afford the cheap crap constantly being forced down our throats by the advertisers. Where toxic vinyl wasn’t the norm, where wood and logs weren’t seen as too quaint even for the rural home. Where people have land, where whatever nuisance they create by everyday living has basically no impact on anyone else. There is some of that town in the of Plattsburgh but not really.