On June 8, 1963, the Illustrated London News ran the following story about an exhibition at the gorilla house at The Bronx Zoo in New York City. The exhibit told visitors:
“You are looking at the most dangerous animal in the world. It alone of all the animals that ever lived can exterminate (and has) entire species of animals. Now it has the power to wipe out all life on earth.”
From atop the jagged mountain, cars, people, and houses appear as tiny versions of themselves, the noise of their day to day activity muted so high in the air. Scrubby vegetation grows from cracks in the rock, soaking up the sun and rustling in the slight breeze. Birds caw as they alight at the top of a slope, observing the expanse below them.
The mountain is just another part of the topography to those that live near it, but it is not a natural part of the landscape. The mountain is completely artificial, a colossus formed not by eons of geologic change but the vigor of industrial concrete production. Artificial mountains have sprung up all over the world, the result of hellish manufacturing processes, piled construction and mining waste, or in some cases built deliberately to add a humongous new feature to the horizon.
I grew up on a first-generation dairy farm, and some days, I hated it. I hated that sometimes the cows got out, and I was late to school because we had to put them away. I hated the jokes that kids made about me smelling like manure or wearing boots that actually had mud on them. I didn’t always want to spend my evenings in the barn, feeding calves or helping milk.
My parents were often too busy to go to all of my games and events. We rarely went on vacation. I didn’t understand why people would tell me that growing up on a farm was a blessing. I hated waiting for chores to be done before opening presents at Christmas time and that we had to leave family events early to do chores. I didn’t understand why my friends always wanted to see the cows when they came over instead of hanging out in the house. Overall, I wasn’t always proud to be a farm kid.
Looking back, getting to grow up as a farm kid was one of the best things that my parents did for me. I loved being able to have animals like horses, donkeys, sheep, alpacas, and goats along with our cows, and I loved naming the baby calves and watching them grow up. I just didn’t understand that even all the things that I didn’t like about growing up on a farm at the time would both help me later in life, and those would be the things that I miss the most when I’m away.
We live in a society made up mostly of rabid consumers. As soon as the advertising pros on Madison Avenue point them in a given direction, people flock to it like the zombies on The Walking Dead lurch toward a fresh human, completely oblivious to everything else. They yearn for these things that are produced across the world and then delivered at a cheap price. They fill up on cheap food that has been government subsidized, making it unrealistically inexpensive. They are enslaved as they work to pay for it, or in some cases, accept a handout to pay for it. More people are deeply in debt than ever, living a fancy First World Lifestyle that would crumble with one missed paycheck. They are slaves and they don’t even know it.
It can be exciting moving to a rural or more sparsely populated area, while at the same time it is normal to feel apprehensive especially if moving from a heavily populated area. As with anything, there are good points and there are of course, bad points, nothing is what it seems however, until you have experienced it firsthand.
cows on his family farm, and his son wants to become the fifth. But a recent decision by the Pennsylvania Game Commission may change Kilgore’s plans. The Airville, York County, farmer was recently notified by the agency that the approximately 70 acres he farms on two nearby state game land tracts (SGL 83 and SGL 181) will be changing, reverting from a primary use of active agriculture to a focus on wildlife habitat.
