A love affair with the piney woods

By Darrell Laurant

Published: April 16, 2008

Even the middle of nowhere has to be somewhere. It all depends on your perspective.

Take Janisse Ray, for instance. She grew up on a farm attached to a junkyard, hard by U.S. 1 in the piney flatlands of South Georgia. It’s the sort of place that most people would flee as soon as they turned 18 and never look back.

Ray not only looked back, she went back. She returned with a master’s degree and three books to her credit, one of them praised by the New York Times and chosen as “The Book All Georgians Should Read” for the year in which it was published.

And yet she’s now living alongside the same highway and in close proximity to the same junkyard (which her father still owns) as in her childhood.

Why? Because it’s home.

“Wallace Stegner once said, ‘Tell me where you’re from, and I’ll tell you who you are,’” said Ray, who will be speaking at Lynchburg College’s Hall Campus Center on April 21 (7:30 p.m.), the day before Earth Day.

It’s not that easy anymore. I’ll offer myself as an example — I lived in Atlanta, New Orleans and Wisconsin before I was five, grew up in Upstate New York, went to college in North Carolina, and then worked in South Carolina before settling down in Lynchburg. Where am I from? Beats me.

Ray believes that this all-too-common disconnection from defining place, extended family, and (perhaps most important of all) the land has created a multitude of societal ills.

“We just don’t spent that much time outside any more,” she said. “We don’t know our neighbors. We don’t know what trees grow in our woods, what phase the moon is
in …”
And because we’ve lost that connection to nature, we don’t feel so bad when it goes away.

It’s easy to excited over a threat to some pristine Western wilderness, but who cares about the mundane piney woods of the Deep South?

Janisse Ray cares. Deeply, and eloquently. Her first book, “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood,” takes an honest but loving look at the part of the world where she was raised, and it was assigned as required reading in some LC classes prior to her talk.

“Every now and then, in some places, you can see what South Georgia used to look like,” Ray said, “before so much of the longleaf pine was clearcut.”

You can see that in Central Virginia. Get out of town and drive into Campbell County or parts of Bedford, and you’ll come face-to-face with acres of denuded former woodland, scenes like the aftermath of a Category 5 hurricane.

We do need wood, but the title of Ray’s talk asks a pertinent question: “How Clear Cut Does it Have to Be?”

Although Ray has cultivated a passionate worldview over the years, her focus is local.

“Why do we truck our food in from California?” she asks. “We should start growing and buying as much of our food as possible where we live.”

Ray lives on her Georgia farm with her husband, Raven Waters, and a multitude of farm animals. When she travels to talks such as the one in Lynchburg, she prefers trains to automobiles and airplanes, because of environmental considerations.

And what does she do for fun, down there in the piney woods?

“I got hooked on trapeze work when I lived in Vermont,” she said. “I’ve got one in the barn.”