Jere Brittain 2014 Interview

Partial Transcript: I commented in an essay I wrote a few years ago that Mills River was—when I was growing up—as much a part of my life as eating and sleeping. It was just part and parcel with growing up, especially at my home place, which was right at the confluence of the north and south forks. So practically everything that happened had something to do with the river. The bottomlands were created by the river where we did our farming—the corn part of it—and we fished in it. We bathed in it. We swam in it in the summer. As I mentioned earlier, I trapped for fur-bearing animals on its banks, went hunting, cut firewood at the river. And on the other hand, the river was somewhat taken for granted in terms of water quality issues that are of concern nowadays. But it was—the water was regarded as good enough quality to swim in and even—up at the national forest—to drink right out of the river when I was a kid.

Partial Transcript: Baptizing took place at the bend of the river, right out behind the church—no namby-pamby sprinkles on the head. I mean we were dunked in the river.

Partial Transcript: Well, certainly going swimming, which was actually was both swimming and bathing at the end of a hot day in the fields. It would rejuvenate you—the North Mills River especially, which is a few degrees colder than South Mills, because of its shorter distance through the wilderness. That was really revitalizing, for kids in particular. Another major memory about the river is the little place where I grew up. It was more or less isolated by the river. There was no driveway for cars. In order for a car or for horses to get to our place, you had to go through a ford in the river—a shallow place. I had to walk to catch the school bus. We went across a foot bridge—a log taken right from the mountains here, a plank surface and maybe one sideboard on it—and that was quite a risky venture when ice and snow were on it. (laughs) A couple of people slid off the thing into the river which was—that would get you wide awake on a winter morning. (laughs)

Partial Transcript: Emotions were—tended to be not openly displayed in this community. I think it was part of our culture, for both men and women. The only occasions I can think of seeing a man cry, for example, would have been at a—someone who had been—who was bereaved at a funeral service or someone—on rarer occasions, there would be a man who would be so spiritually inspired at church who might show a tear or two. But by and large, I recall the adults of this community as rather stoic and hesitant to display great emotion. I’m not sure why. That’s just the way it was.

Partial Transcript: Most people in this community—of course, I came along when—at least according to the records, the Great Depression was beginning to be over in 1935—the worst days of it. But nobody noticed here because everybody had a farm, and nobody was hungry because of living in a rural situation and being rather self-sufficient for food. Nobody was wealthy, but nobody was hungry. So in that sense, I don’t think the Great Depression was noticed nearly as much in a community like this as it would have been certainly in the cities. And so I daresay the household economies operated much the same way in 1939 as it did in 1929 here. By 1949, things had begun to change because of industrialization and the post-war boom. There were factories beginning to show up, and so by the late ’40s, most families were beginning to have one member who would be working off the farm at some place of regular employment in commerce or industry.

Partial Transcript: I’ve thought a lot about the relevance of my childhood experience to my grandchildren. We have a five-, a seven-, and twelve-year-old grandsons nearby, and I’ve tried various things to expose them a little bit to experiences like I had as a kid, and it just doesn’t work very well, it seems to me. So I’m not sure what there was about my experience that’s relevant to children these days. In fact, all three of these kids are growing up on the same property as I grew up. And so I think they’re exposed to more wildlife, for example, in a woodsy environment and places to go on walks or explore more or less unimpeded on this same property. But because they aren’t required to or expected to work very much—so much a part of my experience at this same property involved work and in a way that has made me appreciate working with my hands as an important part of my life experience. Somehow, this is missing for them, and I don’t know whether it’s transferable. I’d like for somebody to tell me how to transfer that, because I don’t think they’re having the same—making the same connection between working with their hands and working with their heads.

Partial Transcript: One of the things that—I think it’s hard for young people today to get experiences—apprenticeship-type experiences about working that would make them able to be self-reliant in the context of blackouts or what have you. I don’t think the answer is—I was reading recently about some folks who were giving courses on how to be prepared for the apocalypse. I don’t see that as the answer because it has some sort of fatalistic overtones that I don’t care for. But I do think that there are some places like Warren Wilson College and Berea College that are, at the college level, still requiring work experiences and rewarding them. But that’s really pretty late for kids to be getting it. I think it might be possible for the schools to be a little more inviting for people who have these self-reliant skills to share this with kids. And maybe those of us who are still fortunate enough to have property where some of these kinds of experiences can be provided ought to be more forthcoming and public spirited about sharing it with kids. It’s a challenging thing to figure out ways to impart this to children.

Partial Transcript: Seven through twelve. When I—my first thoughts about life at seven through twelve down at the home place revolve around schooldays. I guess a typical school day would have been hearing my mother up and about in the kitchen, next to the room where I slept, building a fire in the cook stove to fix breakfast. You just can’t do that very quietly, and that was kind of the wake-up call for Jere Brittain as a small boy.
I imagine the school bus would have run probably quarter of eight or so, and this would have been going on at six-thirty or so, I should think.
She had an alarm clock around—a hand-wound alarm clock—but I don’t think she ever needed it to be up and about. She was an early riser. It was just part of her. So we would have breakfast. Maybe eventually I would be involved with a farm chore or two before going to catch the school bus, over the foot log and across the river. The school bus was—it had longitudinal seats instead of seats crossways in the bus—a long bench on the two outside walls of the bus for the older children, high school or so, and a middle seat for the younger children—and it was a big deal when you graduated from the middle seat to the side seat. So there was this long bus ride over mostly gravel road, dusty in the summer and muddy in the winter. Occasionally, the buses would break down and the kids would need to be rescued somehow or another because of a malfunctioning bus.

A day at school in the early days, there was not any food served in the lunchroom. That was later, so we’d carry lunch pails with or lunchboxes with food and a thermos of something to drink. In my first recollections of school, there was a rest period where we’d have the—probably in the first through the third grades—a little homemade pallet to lie down and take a rest after lunch, I believe. At recess, there were bona fide recesses where you could go outdoors for several minutes, I think, twice a day in the early grades to play games, play ball of some kind, or just marbles or games in the dirt.

Partial Transcript: Well, kickball where you would—it was kind of like I call it softball rules with the bases consisting of trees around the schoolyard. You would kick the ball and try to make it around the bases. Marbles—and a big deal about marbles was the question of whether or not you could play marbles for keeps, which some of the mothers—including my own—viewed as a form of gambling, and she didn’t approve of playing marbles for keeps. So I didn’t become really a champion marble player because of that restriction. (laughs) Never was any good at poker either for the same reason, I guess. Later on, the girls in particular did jump board. They’d have this twelve-foot-long springboard across a fulcrum and jump—to great heights, actually—and that was considered kind of a borderline sport for them, too, because of the danger of breaking an ankle or what have you. Later on, more organized sports—by the time of high school or really eighth grade or so, I’d taken a great interest in baseball, which was another case of something handed down more by apprenticeship than it was by coaching. The older kids would mentor the younger ones out during free times on the playground to teach them how to play baseball, in the case of the boys, or softball usually, in the case of the girls.

Partial Transcript: I remember practically all of them. Miss BB Corpening was my first-grade teacher, and she taught for probably forty-five years at least at Mills River School. And my second-grade teacher was Miss Edith Byrd. My third-grade was Mrs. Foster. My fourth grade was BB’s sister, Miss Ruth Corpening. My fifth grade was Miss Bowen and so on. This was a cohort of teachers who were just there for a long time, and so they knew the various members of families. In the first grade, I probably missed a total of two months of school because of illness—respiratory problems and so forth—but I managed to be promoted to second grade, I think because of the good reputation of my brother. (laughs) So very fond memories of Mills River School and the teachers there.

Getting back to a day in my life, the after-school activities when I got home via the school bus would almost always involve farm chores of some kind, ranging from bringing wood in for cooking or heating—sometimes in the late summer and early fall, we’d go cut corn in the field to begin the corn harvesting process after school. By the time we were nine or ten years old, we were expected to do our part of the farm chores—milking cows, feeding chickens, taking surplus kitchen foods to feed the pigs—later on, running trap lines for a little bit of income.

Partial Transcript: I think my family didn’t have as much knowledge of wild plants for food as some families probably had in the mountains. We would gather wild grapes—fox grapes, for example. My mother would make juice out of those. Occasionally, we’d gather hickory nuts that—believe it or not, as difficult as they are to shell, she would actually extract enough of the meat—the kernel from hickory nuts—to use for flavoring baked goods. What else? Elderberries—wild elderberries. She would sometimes harvest—my mother—and make elderberry jams. So I guess we did a bit of foraging, now that I begin to think of it. The wild filberts—the hazelnuts sometimes were harvested and dried.
We didn’t deal with homegrown medicinals with—maybe she might have gathered some sassafras roots for making tea. I don’t know whether you’d just consider that a beverage or if she considered it medicinal. But my mother was—by the time I think she—that the children came along, she was beginning to believe more in the community doctor than she was in herbals for medicine. She was probably the generation that began to become less interested in herbal medicines. There was an exception or two in the community. An older woman named—she was known to everybody as Aunt Tiny Edmundson, and she was an herb doctor. But I think my family didn’t necessarily believe in her remedies by the time we came along.

Partial Transcript: I think most of our family celebrations were not—obviously, were not extravagant. There wasn’t money to buy expensive gifts—just something special and symbolic. My favorite gifts in my boyhood were probably pocketknives. I was forever losing them, and so I always hoped for a new pocketknife to support my trapping habits and hunting habits. At Christmas, a bit of citrus or some candy and a product that’s hard to find anymore called cluster raisins—they were raisins on the stem that were around as gifts during holiday seasons—the most delicious raisins you ever tasted.

Partial Transcript: A favorite place to dream or reflect—my recollections by and large are of being so busy I didn’t have much time to reflect. I’m sure there were those moments—maybe more often when I was out hiking. Sometimes on weekends, my brother and I in particular would go hiking back in the Pisgah National Forest, so those were good times for reflection. While hunting, a lot of the time one spends hunting for wild game consists of sitting around and contemplating the trees, especially in those days. The wildlife was very scarce.

Partial Transcript: Well, Christmas was—it was a big deal in our family, not through extravagant gifts but just through tradition and traditional activities. We’d cut the tree—usually a cedar—from up in the pasture someplace. And I recall we would tie the tree. We didn’t have a nice container with water in it to keep it fresh, so we’d kind of wire it to a shoe last, a shoe last being a device where—that was some hardware nailed to the top of a block of wood about this tall with a hand-forged rod sticking up from it, and on that you put a device in the shape of a shoe where shoes could be mended. So that was the anchor for the Christmas tree. We’d tie or wire the thing onto this shoe-last support. The decorations early on were—didn’t involve, obviously, anything electrical because there was no electricity in the house until the early ’40s. And so the decorations—some of them were homemade. Some of them were tinselly things that my mother had acquired somehow or another, and we used the same ones year after year. It was a special food day. She would manage to have a chicken or a couple of special food items. She had a great fruitcake recipe that was an extravagance for the Christmas holiday. We still have that recipe around that JoAnn uses occasionally, I believe. And a few cookies and fruits or maybe a bag full of nuts that were quite exotic for us. Sometimes part of the day was spent by the male members of the family out hunting for rabbits or something—if it didn’t occur on a Sunday, Christmas Day. As you begin together hunting—hunting for rabbits in particular was a pretty big deal when I was a kid.

Partial Transcript: My early days, even though I have very good memories about them, informed me primarily that it was going to be hard for me to make a living in Mills River. (laughs) So my trajectory was off to do other things because it was pretty clear that there wasn’t really a realistic opportunity for the little farm to support more than one generation at a time. Even though my parents were able to keep it, there was a time they might could have improved their financial situation by selling the farm or by borrowing a lot of money to mechanize the farm. They chose not to do that, but they kept it, and it’s still a family compound, you might say. But by the time I had finished high school this was—fortunately for me, I guess, between—at the end of the Korean War and before the Vietnam War. And so because of the model that my brother had set—he’d gone off to the Air Force out of high school for four years, which qualified him for the GI Bill, which got him through Clemson College. So I kind of followed his footsteps in that same pathway by enlisting in the Air Force for four years and having access to the GI Bill to finance a college career.

Partial Transcript: Well, my first major at Clemson coming out of the Air Force was ag education, I think because of my admiration for an ag teacher I had in high school here. A gentleman named John Holliman, now deceased, was almost a second father figure to me. He really introduced his students—then high school students—to the idea of science and agriculture. Things by the late ’40s and early ’50s were really beginning to be exciting—the mechanization and with—so the idea of not having to hoe corn anymore was a pretty exciting idea to a kid who had spent a lot of hours hoeing corn. It’s debatable nowadays whether the solutions were all necessarily good for society. That’s a whole ‘nother issue. But anyway, after a year or so in ag education at Clemson, I changed my major to horticulture because of a charismatic horticulture teacher, who’s still living in his mid-nineties, T.L Senn. And so I became excited about plant sciences, and after college and a little while in the agribusiness industry, I went back to graduate school in a field—kind of an esoteric field called plant physiology—how plants work at the biochemical level—and eventually made my way back to Clemson as a member of the faculty there, where I spent thirty or so very happy years, partly in extension outreach for the university and the last fifteen or so years in teaching and organizing graduate programs for design to try and balance the training of agriculture majors with some environmental issues.

Partial Transcript: Well, that is a fascinating question and one that’s on my mind a lot these days. I currently chair an organization called the Mills River Partnership, which you had been a part of through the eco connection. And the purpose of this partnership is to try to harmonize highly technical farm production in Mills River Valley to water quality concerns, and it’s a daunting task. Some of the problems with water quality date back to my late high school years, and this is how it connects. In those days of all-out fencerow-to-fencerow production in agriculture, there was a period of time when vegetables—such as lima beans, pole beans, and snap beans—were growing in a lot of the fields in the valley. And so to control the insects on these, they were flying crop dusters and dive-bombing these fields. I mean they were dusting when they came into the field right over the river and dusting when they pulled up to avoid the next mountain. You wouldn’t believe how exciting this was to watch. It looked like aerial combat. Well, some of the stuff they were dusting with—most of it—was chlorinated hydrocarbons, which linger around until this day in the soils of Mills River. So whenever torrential rains occur and the soil has been disturbed, then the sediment goes into the river. It’s carrying not only some of the currently used pesticides but these so-called legacy pesticides. Isn’t that a quaint name?

And it provokes one to wonder. I’ve raised this question with our board of directors of the partnership. What sort of—hadn’t we better be careful about legacies that we may be leaving that nobody’s paying much attention to? Just as they didn’t to the chlorinated hydrocarbons in those days. So we’re attempting to learn from past issues and so it’s an ongoing—I consider it sort of a sociological experiment to see if farmers and other landowners are going to voluntarily take seriously the stewardship of the water and remedy the sediment runoff that’s still taking place and is of concern because of Mills River being the water supply for tens of thousands of people in Henderson and Buncombe counties. The tricky part of this is that, for example, in tomato production, it’s now an industrial process. It doesn’t look like farming at all with the plastic row covers and the use of soil fumigants and once-a-week spraying of fungicides and sometimes insecticides. And with all of this impervious surface where water can’t penetrate, if you get a four-inch-per-hour rain event, the water’s going to go someplace, namely into the river. And it’s going to be interesting to see whether voluntary compliance by the farmers will work or not. They are trying with some financial incentive through cost sharing conservation practices, but if voluntary compliance doesn’t work, the alternative is more regulations for agriculture, which agriculture steadfastly opposes. So I think it’s—the jury is still out.

Partial Transcript: Well, I think it undoubtedly must have some effect. The globalization of food is—gives a whole different dynamic than locally produced food where your neighbor—you may know the person by name who’s producing it. Dairy farming is probably one of the better examples. It’s gone all the way from when people in Mills River had their own milk cows to—fifty or so small dairy farms in the ’50s—the 1950s—to now maybe two dairy farms in all of Henderson County. And so as—it does make a disconnect, I guess, between food production and food consumption. I don’t think it’s all bad. I rather enjoy being able to go to Ingles and buy fresh fruits and vegetables year round. That’s amazing. But it does put a tremendous burden on the food production system all the way from the farmer through transportation to processing to assure the safety and the quality of this food. And I think agriculture takes this seriously, so I’m not prepared to suggest that our society would be ready to turn back the clock. I don’t think it’s possible to turn back technological clocks. I think you have to adapt, adjust, and try to harmonize the new technologies in food production with other needs of society, such as water quality.

Partial Transcript: One of the major changes that I’ve seen in my own lifetime about this community—Upper Mills River—even though we were away from here for thirty-some years, we stayed connected on weekends and visits. And so we’ve seen it change from a rather tightly knit community up through around the late ’40s or early 1950s—fifty or so families to—in the upper part of the valley—twice that many families now with—most of these families barely know each other, except the ones who are related with family relations. And so we’ve lost, aside from the changes in agriculture, just the changes as people have refocused. If their job is in Asheville or Hendersonville or Brevard or outside of the community for essentially all their family income—or most of it anyway—and with the transition in organizations like the local church—the Mills River Baptist Church—it’s no longer the center of the community as it was in the old days. The consolidation of public schools—Mills River had a high school in the old days and before that community one-room schools. So the schools have become more distant from the community, and people feel less sense of ownership in the schools. So that has resulted in some loss of the strong sense of place that one felt in the earlier days, and I don’t know what’ll come along to—it’s interesting and a little ironic that people who are retiring here from other parts of the country, if not the world, now probably have a—they suddenly or shortly feel a stronger sense of place being here and appreciate the amenities of western North Carolina more than the people who’ve been here for generations, who have sort of come to take it for granted. And that’s a curious dynamic to me. (laughs)

Partial Transcript: Oral history—until relatively recent generations, all of history was oral really. And so there are probably some aspects of cultural roots that are better conveyed orally than perhaps in writing or in digital sourcing like Googling or texting or that sort of thing. There’s a—I guess it gets into the area of intangible communication where a kid would sit down with an elder and have enough respect to take the time to hear the elder’s stories and process it however they might. But I think that that sort of—those fireside type conversations are not happening as often as they might, and that may be a loss. There are other things about the digital age that may be a gain. It makes it—I’ve known people who are my age and older that take up genealogy because of the convenience of doing genealogy on the computer, so the digital age can be turned to some advantage in collecting and retaining and maintaining history and probably making it more accurate than memories of old guys like me.

Partial Transcript: I still think to learn to work with one’s hands is underrated in the educational experience, especially to somehow expose younger children to this idea that—of the importance to one’s sense of wellbeing that comes from working with your hands. If you—I think your ability to work with your head is diminished if you can’t do some things with your hands. That’s how I think I’m wired, anyway. (laughs)

Partial Transcript: I find it difficult to contemplate how people who—how young people today—say young adults would cope with life if the clock were suddenly turned back seventy-five years or so—my own lifespan—without any kind of preparation for it. I don’t actually—maybe they would adapt. Human beings have amazing capacity to adapt, and they would have no choice but to adapt. And so that’s—I suppose that’s one of the qualities that makes humans human, is this evolutionary ability they’ve gained to adapt to change. So I suppose one would expect if they could adapt to changes generally known as progress, they could also adapt to changes that are retrogressive, such as you described with the large-scale power failures and so forth. You would do what you had to do. There’s a biologist/philosopher named E.O. Wilson, who’s probably my literary hero at this moment. He has out a number of books that are greatly to be admired, and I’m promoting those with my twelve-year-old grandson. He talks a lot about this issue of humans understanding themselves as part of this continuum in an amazingly diverse world, and he comes away from it with optimism about it—that humans can use the same skills that have brought us to this highly technological era with all its problems—that these same skills can be turned to solving the problems. He talks about this crossroads. He’s still around in his mid eighties up at Harvard and still advocating for the idea that it’s not too late to salvage sustainability in a technological world, and I like what he has to say about it.

Partial Transcript: Well, Wilson says that it’s almost impossible to break the chain because we’re wired with it. We’re kin to the bacteria, which he describes, as you know, in his book called Biophilia. The reason why humans feel connected to other living things is because we are connected. And so that, I think, is the basis of his optimism that we’ll learn to appreciate well enough our kinship with the other organisms to not do them harm. So I find that a reassuring idea. It may not be realistic, but it’s reassuring.

Partial Transcript: I think the Mills River—the water in these two branches of the river, the north and south forks, where I’ve had the good fortune to live a good part of my life—if I can play a part in this river being passed on to my grandchildren in better shape ecologically than it was—