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Roots and bedrock
Labels can corral us and keep us from thinking outside that enclosure. Most Southerners, for example, pride themselves on being conservative, yet few seem to remember the root of the word itself. When people speak of “conservative values,” they are using a catch phrase that refers hardly at all to what the word really means. When I remember how my grandmother saved every button, every recipe, every morsel of food left on the table, or how my grandfather cherished and cared for every square inch of his farm, I know that this is where real conservative values begin.
My late father had a wall full of plaques honoring his work in conserving wildlife, water, soil, the web of life upon which we depend. It’s worth remembering that loving and taking care of a place, its community, its trees, its valleys and fields, is a conservative action. And it’s worth reminding ourselves that language itself rests upon the foundation of what the Irish poet Seamus Heaney calls linguistic hardcore, which in turn rests upon the bedrock of place.
What happens, then, when pieces of that bedrock begin slipping away? When whole landscapes are threatened with unimaginable change and destruction, whether by natural disaster or by political and economic forces? We all witnessed the horrific devastation of Hurricane Katrina, but what of other, more insidious, forces that destroy rather than conserve? Landscapes sold to the highest bidder for gated communities bearing names chosen by CEO’s and marketers living hundreds of miles away. Coastlines threatened by rising sea levels as a result of melting ice caps. Entire communities and eco-systems in Appalachia compromised by mountaintop removal to satisfy our increasing demand for electricity.
Perhaps it is time for those of us who claim the label of conservative to think about what the word means and in doing so, begin to speak the names of our cherished places, our bedrock. Names have power to move us to action and to heal us in ways we cannot explain. Say Snowbird, Shining Rock, Raven’s Fork, and rising up in my imagination are blue mountains, a hawk circling, the sound of wind rushing through the valleys. When these names work their magic in my imagination, I do not need anyone urging conservative values upon me.
For years conflict has simmered over building a road through a segment of the Great Smokies National Park, so that inhabitants of the adjoining county can visit the graves of their ancestors. I would be surprised if anyone in all that time has wondered what those ancestors might wish. A road through a precious wild area they themselves perhaps enjoyed, so that family members might be able to stand with a little less trouble at their graves? Or might those long-departed souls desire a place left free of a road’s impact, a forest where wildlife and native plants can live as nature intended? I suspect the ancestors know better than their descendants what conservative values really mean – a resting place rich with the living names of things they once lived among, names that sing like a litany over the landscape.
(Editor’s Note: Kay Byer has served as the North Carolina Poet Laureate, an ambassador of the state’s literature, since her appointment by Gov. Mike Easley in February 2005. Her columns on the importance of everyday language will appear monthly in The Sylva Herald. Byer and her husband, Jim, live in Cullowhee.
For more information on the poet laureate and the state’s literature programs, visit www.ncarts.org
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