Appalachia? or U.S.?

Suspicion. That's the thing that's changed the most since I last lived in the States. The dominant emotion toward strangers seems to have become: suspicion.

Or is it just being back in Appalachia?

My brother was in his nice rented vacation house a couple of days ago and went for a walk around the pretty garden. As he strolled by the locked shed in the back, the next-door neighbor fired off his gun. Later my sister tried to walk down from the house to the little river a few feet below (you can see it in the photo), where people from the village across the river were playing, and another neighbor came out and yelled, "That's private property!"

At the airport the other day, I was not given a seat assignment until I got to the gate (this is a new and unpleasant addition to the nonstop hassle of airplane travel these days). After the agent showed up, I got up and asked the woman sitting next to me to watch my suitcases as I stood right in front of her just a few feet away to get an assigned seat. She refused with a frown. I might be a terrorist, I guess.

I do remember our old concierge, though, and the Guy de Maupassant story in which a man's life is ruined because his neighbors see him stoop to pick up a piece of string in the road. Whether it is called méfiance or mistrust, and whatever the reason, it's a nasty emotion that I don't like to see becoming more common.

Comments

[LA Frog]

Very interesting post. And true. Mistrust is a fact of life in this U.S. There is mistrust everywhere, but it's particularly exacerbated here, especially since 9/11.

[tongue-tied]

You’ve stolen my life. I miss it very much. I would like to have it back at your earliest convenience.

I’m sometimes amused by the search for grander themes in the quotidian.

“This better be important,” the boss said as he stared at the hem of his secretary’s dress. “I don’t have a minute to waste.”

I quite probably would have refused to watch your bags in the airport, and probably with a frown, but not out of concern for any terrorist aspirations on your part. I would have been afraid that you would disappear for who knows how long and I would have felt obligated to remain as your sentry.

Also, you state that your brother rented this vacation home. That might imply others occupied the place before him. “Others” might not have been nice neighbors.

Too, I’ve generally found “country” people to be less immediately accepting of “outsiders.” I don’t think it has anything to do with suspicions of terrorism. It has to do with poverty, and the lack of education, fear and resentment that poverty often breeds.

At least the secretary was pretty.

[Eric Drummond Smith]

Another alternative answer? You had really crummy neighbors. Increasingly in the mountains this is the product of people trying to reject the simple truth that Applachia's future wealth lies overwhelmingly in various forms of tourism. As festivals and trails abound, tourists from out of area increasingly ignore boundaries that were taken for granted before. It is not excuse for rudeness, but that might be it.

Of course Appalachians are generally wary (though usually, I might add, cordial at the minimum) of folks from outside of the region, in no small part because for one hundred and fifty years our political-economy was, essentially, a colony of the industrial North, while our essentially Southern culture was disowned by other Southerners. That kind of experience leaves some psychological and cultural, I don't want to say scars, hmmm, perhaps the word is "artifacts." I don't know you're interested, but several of my peers and I have a blog on the region (Hillbilly Savants) where we discuss just this sort of thing. Also, while I have driven past Bat Cave many times, I fear I've never stopped. My jealousy lacks no bounds.

PS - Great blog.

[Sedulia]

Thanks Eric! I like yours too.

Have you ever read "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fisher? It was very interesting on the four English waves that settled the American colonies. I hadn't realized that the Appalachians were largely settled by people from the Scottish borderlands, who had been at war with their neighbors for centuries. That explained a lot!