About the only controversy that gets a rise out of local people in a rural landscape in Northern Appalachia is a barn on a scarcely trafficked road that says TRUMP. Next to it is a Confederate flag. The guy who owns the barn and made the sign is in his sixties. He grew up there. The Confederate flag is meant to rankle, but not too much.
Trump supporters love the sign, and others find it deplorable. The barn guy, Mark Doring, is a bit of a humorist. He likes to rile people up, and probably put the sign up for that reason. Nobody really cares except for recent immigrants from the city, whose shoulders get tight, but even they recognize that it is free speech, and he is allowed to paint what he wants on his barn. While the media tries to get everyone stirred up over Trump, or abortion, or fracking, or what have you, people in this area of Northern Appalachia are almost as distant from current events as Martians. The election is something that the people in the big cities care about. Up here, we are just waiting for July and the Fair on the Square, to catch up on gossip, and watch the kids play basketball, soccer, and four-square, and make enough money to pay our taxes so that the Democrat leaders can pay their prostitutes instead of sexually assaulting staff.
I have a kitchen window that looks out over an undeveloped mountain just in back of the Delaware River in the western Catskills. Turkey buzzards circle for roadkill down on Route Ten. In the cities everything is in motion: nothing is affirmed. When city people speak, it is parody upon parody of a lost original. Underneath it is a quiet sadness: the mourning of the unmoored. They seem to worry about presentation and words and symbols because there is nothing very solid beneath the surface. Out here, in the hinterlands, there is not so much uncertainty. The Trump sign nevertheless bothers me a tiny bit because of the Confederate symbol. Asked what people should do who do not like the sign, Mark Doring answered, “Go another way”. His road is in fact a strange loop up a largely unimproved mountain where you are more likely to see a bobcat than a pedestrian or another car.
Much of this area has been lost, some of it when NYC filled two valleys with rainwater in thirty-mile-long rivers which inundated a dozen villages. Delhi didn’t get that problem, but it has been steadily inundated with remote workers from NYC, whose values are very different from those of the locals. When the train stopped running in 1957 and was replaced by the highway, an aspect of Delhi was mostly lost, but it can still be found in the summer. We have bands play in the octagonal building (gazebo) in front of the Courthouse. There are hotdogs, and fireworks, and cotton candy, and people sell everything from American flags to toys and potato salad, while children compete for prizes by playing basketball, and there is a parade in which the fire departments of hamlets from all over the county try to keep in step as they march down Main Street. At the county fair, merchants sell amazing numbers of Confederate flags. People attach them to their pickup trucks and fly them throughout the county.
The county still has farms, local businesses, and shops. The local people have real farms that produce milk. Pseudo-agrarians, however, are moving up from New York City. They have alpaca farms and grow peculiar varieties of cheese. One retired advertising executive tries hard to grow food on his land on top of a mountain, but he estimated that it costs him 500 dollars for each successful strawberry.
Pseudo-agrarians are moving up from New York City. They have alpaca farms and grow peculiar varieties of cheese. One retired advertising executive tries hard to grow food on his land on top of a mountain, but he estimated that it costs him 500 dollars for each successful strawberry.
The tiny creeks that flow through Delhi drift into the Delaware River, which is the 34th largest river in America, and the only major American river to never be dammed. One reason for this is that it flows through four states: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, so they must agree, and have never been able to do so. The river flows on top of the Marcellus Shale Deposits, which in turn trap billions of tons of gasoline which companies wish to frack—a procedure that frees the gas for industrial usage, but can cause it to leak into the water table.
Main St. Delhi has two traffic lights, and one of the two seems unnecessary. In addition to the Delaware river, which is rather small at this point (about twenty feet in width), the other thoroughfare is route 28, which extends from Kingston on the Hudson (about an hour and a half east) to Cooperstown (about an hour and a half to the northwest).
The local people often have missing teeth (dentists are pricey and hard to find), but they are usually self-sufficient when it comes to plumbing, electrical wiring, and carpentry, especially if they have been through a program at the college where I teach. You can count on the local people.
When I speak to locals, they are mostly Trump supporters. They see local industries going under from the heavy taxation of the Democrats, which siphons money out of the rural areas and gives it to the cities. Obamacare, as Justice Roberts said, is a tax. Many local businesses closed when it passed. Car companies, restaurants, and even farms closed. Healthcare has to be an individual concern, and a family concern, and a national concern. Everyone should have it, but it shouldn’t be dumped on the rural business community to solve, or they will shutter. In this county, 11,012 voted for Donald Trump in 2016, while 5,825 voted for Hillary Clinton. About four hundred people voted for Jill Stein.
Healthcare has to be an individual concern, and a family concern, and a national concern. Everyone should have it, but it shouldn’t be dumped on the rural business community to solve, or they will shutter.
Most of the people who work at the college are Democrats who come in daily from larger towns and cities. Many of them are socialists and believe in global warming. The local people call the college Commie Central. The college staff don’t have to drive past the Trump barn to get here, but it saves minutes, and although it drives them crazy, few have tried to understand the man behind the sign. Mark Doring grew up here and is not a Nazi or even a Confederate. He was by all accounts a mischievous but resourceful and intelligent child, but was never able to get to college, and has lost a leg but no one seems to know how. Personally, I like Doring’s barn, and find it amazing how it emerges out of a dark valley of trees as if it is a shower of light. I go that way sometimes just to experience it. The barn, like Trump himself, seems to have survived from another era. I, personally, would like to get rid of the Confederate symbol next to Trump, as I don’t cotton to slavery, but whatever the sign means to locals, it’s not slavery.
Rather, it signifies a vague and probably futile wish to annoy the newly arrived liberals from the cities. It achieves this. And if you don’t like it, as Mark Doring has said, you can go another way.
