Stultus Valley Days - III: Family Style

Daily life in Stultus Valley was defined primarily by its dense, overlapping web of familial ties.  One of the first questions invariably uttered by the natives when meeting someone new was, “Who are you related to?”

Extended family provided Valley dwellers with the sort of security ordinarily afforded by employers and public agencies in the broader world.  When minor disasters hit, such as summer wildfires and winter blizzards, folks sought the help of relatives rather than that of the county or the Red Cross.  A few extended families ensconced in the rugged draws of the surrounding hillsides were so self-sufficient you rarely saw their ilk in town.  It was probably just as well that the rest of us didn’t venture into those parts very often.  A lot of the people living along the rutted dirt trails supplemented their slender incomes by growing weed or, more ominously, cooking meth.    

Regardless of social circumstances, the Valley exerted a strange, centripetal pull on its natives.  I remember the case of one young lady who was fortunate enough to earn a full-tuition scholarship to a good private liberal arts college.  After graduating, she worked several months in Washington as a White House intern.  Most new college graduates would have parlayed these accomplishments into a solid job or getting into a competitive graduate program.  Instead, she returned to the Valley, unemployed, to live with her mentally ill mother and rehab failure father.  Family is family, after all, even when they poison your life.

It's little surprise, then, that kinship in Stultus Valley frequently took on an ugly cast.  In fact, domestic dysfunction was one of the Valley’s few spectator sports.  The first incident which comes to mind took place on my very own block.  My next door neighbor then was James Hall, the Stultus County sheriff.  James was a tall, burly man whose physical stature belied a teddy-bear personality.  James’ nice-guy demeanor and approachableness resulted in a steady stream of constituents coming to his front door with some grievance or other.

Early one morning, around threeish, I was roused from a sound sleep by a godawful ruckus.  This was unusual; the very best thing about Linden was that it lacked the street sounds you’d have to put up with elsewhere.  Ordinarily the only thing you heard in the dead of night was the occasional hooting of owls. 

A peek out the living room window gave me a front-row view of unfolding events.  The source of the commotion was a diminutive middle-aged woman shouting and pounding on Sheriff Hall’s front door.  Cattycorner across the street was a young man in handcuffs being led by two deputies to a cruiser parked at the curb, lights flashing.

I recognized the guy.  He was the unemployed live-in boyfriend of the checkout clerk at Linden’s hole-in-the-wall grocery, recently discharged from the military after a tour in Iraq.  It appeared that he’d taken exception to something his boo had said, evincing his displeasure by first beating, then choking her.  Fortunately, she managed to get away long enough to dial 911.  Before the cops arrived the boyfriend, this heroic combat veteran, called his mommy for help.

And so there she was, at this ungodly hour, demanding that Sheriff James Hall, clad in but a t-shirt and sweatpants and rubbing the sleep from his eyes, order his deputies to release her only child.  James, often too accommodating for his own good, normally afraid of losing even one vote on Election Day, this time put down his bare foot and said no. 

Mom was apoplectic.  “I’ll have your badge for this!” she screeched, as if she could somehow invalidate the will of the Stultus County electorate with her unbridled wrath. 

Peering through the drapes, taking it all in, I suddenly realized the harridan having an emotional meltdown on James’ front porch looked awfully familiar.  After a moment, I remembered who she was.  She was Belinda Marinero, the new administrator for the county domestic violence prevention program. 

If it hadn’t been for the harrowing ordeal her son’s girlfriend had just suffered at his hands, I would have laughed at the irony.  Not that I was surprised that someone in the Marinero clan had gotten into trouble.  One of the few entertainments in a town like Linden was the county court docket published biweekly in the Valley’s only newspaper, The Stultus Rooster.  The name Marinero appeared often, this one charged with burglary, that one with public drunkenness, another with assault, etc.  Word had it that there was a Marinero relative in state prison for manslaughter.  Still another was in the county lockup, indicted for child molestation and awaiting trial.  I guess you could say that being a Marinero held a sort of rural outlaw cachet, but I wasn’t terribly impressed.

Back to Belinda: I’d met her only once, and that was enough to form a bad impression.  About a week earlier, I’d attended a board meeting for the town community center.  Since it was noontime, a few folks arrived early to have lunch first.  When I got there, Karen, the center’s director, was sitting at the table with a companion who was wolfishly devouring what looked like fettucine alfredo from a takeout container.  The woman was fiftyish, haggard, with badly dyed auburn hair and a heavily lined, vaguely simian face. 

This, I was told, is Belinda.  Belinda ceased her pasta slurping long enough to nod and say, mouth still full,  something along the lines of, “You’ll get to know me soon enough,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

It wasn’t long before I found out.  Belinda’s personality matched her swinish table manners.  I was at the meeting to discuss a recent study commissioned by the state concerning risk factors for child and spousal abuse.  The study found that these risk factors included low levels of educational attainment, economic distress, and substance abuse. 

All of this was pretty boilerplate stuff, conventional wisdom to anyone working in social services.  I was merely the messenger, of course, but Belinda seized upon my report as a personal affront.  She tore into me with an unexpected fury, red faced, voice increasingly strident, telling me with a near-murderous intensity that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.  Why, her rat bastard alcoholic ex-husband left her when little Jacob was still crapping his diapers, leaving her to support the family on a cocktail waitress’ salary.  She didn’t need some overeducated smartass telling her she was someone who might abuse her kid.

The room fell silent.  I’m seldom at a loss for words, but Belinda’s unprovoked, hate-laden tirade left me speechless.  Karen, normally quite friendly towards me, fixed me in a hard stare.  These people were exceedingly tribal, and I’d been in town long enough to know I was alone.  As the outsider, I was wrong.  Knowing it would make things worse if I actually tried to reason with Belinda, I simply closed my report and the meeting moved uncomfortably on.

I’d mostly put the incident out of my mind until young Jacob decided to use his girlfriend as a punching bag.  And what happened to the star-crossed couple, you ask?  About what you’d expect, actually.  The district attorney didn’t press the case against Jacob with much zeal.  After all, you don’t want to jail somebody who’s related to half the county and is Linden’s one and only Iraq war vet. 

In the end, Jacob was merely fined and given a year’s unsupervised probation.   Shortly thereafter he moved back in with the girlfriend, who was overjoyed to have him back. 

A true story, sadly.  But that’s what family means in Stultus Valley.     

Next Installment: The Business of Stultus Valley is…?   

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

 

Stultus Valley Days - II: Meeting the Neighbors

The first thing I noticed was the stares.

I’d just come from my hiring interview with the county.  Deciding to get my bearings, I strolled Linden’s mostly deserted, windswept main street.  After a few minutes I felt that uneasy frisson one gets when someone is looking intently at him.  A couple of rough-looking characters in worn boots and weathered Stetsons were standing just outside the doorway of the Linden Inn, the town’s sole restaurant, bar, and motel.  I quickly realized I stood out: I was a stranger.   

Of course, I knew folks in Stultus Valley were rough spun.  I actually looked forward to working with them precisely because of this quality.  I recalled a book I read in a college anthropology class, Yesterday’s People by Jack Weller.  Weller had been a social worker in Appalachia during the War on Poverty in the early 1960s.  A cultural trait he noticed among the people he worked with was that they tended to live in the moment, were family- rather than community-oriented, and deeply distrusted outsiders.  Like Weller, I harbored the notion that I could break down any resistance with hard work and personal concern for people’s troubles.  Looking back, I suspect I idealized my neighbors in a rather condescending way.  That is my sole regret from my time in the Valley. 

Once I’d settled in, I began to learn the quirks, peculiarities, and idiosyncrasies of the Valley’s denizens.  One of the first things I noticed is that many of their names ended in vowels.  It was soon explained to me that Stultus Valley had been settled by Italian immigrants who herded cattle.  Italian cowboys, if you will.  Italian…cowboys.

I’ll admit I had a difficult time wrapping my mind around the whole idea of an Italian cowboy.  Still do, in fact.  “Italian” and “cowboy” were simply two words I never expected to share the same phrase unless the name Sergio Leone appeared elsewhere in the sentence.

Now, lest you think me narrow minded, please know that I attended public school during the heyday of historical revisionism.  I knew Western settlers came from all kinds of backgrounds.  I learned, for instance, that many cowboys after the Civil War were African-American freedmen.  Hailing from territory which once belonged to Spain and Mexico, I was aware from an early age that the vaqueros were the original cowboys.  But this detail of the Stultus Valley backstory was a bit novel for me.

Having given the idea some thought, however, I quickly realized its potential as a mashup of stale pop culture stereotypes.  Just consider the possibilities: Cowboy Tony.  Cowboy Vinnie.  Cowboy…Don Corleone!  (“Ah made him an offer he couldn’a refuse, pardner.”) 

There are so many questions about how these hardy pioneers lived.  Did they live at home with their mothers?  Did gold chains and crucifixes accessorize well with Western wear?  Was it possible to get an authentic New York slice from the back of a chuck wagon?  What was the equine equivalent of the Chevy Camaro?  Did they whack their rivals with six-shooters?  Could they dance like John Travolta and his buddies in Saturday Night Fever?  Did the women in their lives all have names like Donna, Angie, and Gina?

Oh, I could go on, but you get the idea.  Truth was, they weren’t much different from the garden variety rednecks I grew up around in my own small town: Weathered, resentful, beaten down by life, the descendants of Europe’s social refuse routinely bashed by comedians and eulogized by the likes of Jim Goad and the late Joe Bageant.  Nevertheless, folks in Stultus Valley took this heritage thing seriously.  It wasn’t as if there were many people to dispute them.  So, in the interest of maintaining harmony with my new neighbors I kept my smartass observations to myself.

Besides, their self-image proved rather fragile in the face of strangers.  I got the impression that they saw themselves as like the denizens of TV’s Mayberry, simple but honest folk possessing a homespun wisdom superior to that of the city slicker who would ride into town looking to rook the local rubes but who instead meets his comeuppance at the hands of good Sheriff Andy and friends.

They clearly needed this illusion to sustain their tenuous sense of self-worth.  For many of its natives, the Valley was their whole universe.  The outside world was a scary place hardly acknowledged.  One got the impression they believed if they took one of the two state highways leading out of the Valley that once over the mountains they would fall off the edge of the world and be eaten by dragons.  Consequently, they suffered from a xenophobia which made them quite myopic when beholding outsiders.

An important fact I had to consider was that, unlike the rest of contemporary society, where economic and cultural capital are the yardsticks of position, family relationships dictated Stultus Valley’s social hierarchy.  A question I heard frequently after my arrival was, “Who are you related to?”  Family, whether through blood or marriage, defined you and your place, as well as how other people treated you.  If your stepdaddy’s first cousin once removed had a dispute with the member of another clan, you and everyone else in your family were expected to shun or otherwise show hostility to anyone you met from the rival house. 

Like the Hatfields and McCoys, these feuds, often over petty, insignificant matters, could last for years or, occasionally, across generations.  Given the absence of any meaningful extracurricular pursuits, however, these protracted disputes served as a sort of drearily malign pastime for an isolated population with way too much time on its hands.  Navigating the thorny terrain of familial relationships in Stultus Valley would prove a formidable challenge for an outsider like me, as I was soon to learn.

Next installment: Family Style

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

Stultus Valley Days - I Make a New Start

First post in a recurring series

I got an email a while back from a friend I hadn’t heard from in a long time, informing me that a mutual acquaintance from Stultus Valley had passed away. 

Stultus Valley…God, hearing that name takes me back!  I’d only lived and worked there a short time, less than two years in all, but the experience left a lasting impression.

I landed in Stultus Valley after the Great Recession very nearly ended my academic career before it could begin.  I was working toward my doctorate at a research university when budget cuts eliminated my teaching fellowship and with it my ability to cover tuition and expenses.  I tried, unsuccessfully, to land an adjunct position that would have kept me in the game for the time being.

Since I enjoy eating and having a roof over my head I clearly needed to get a job, even if that meant getting a “straight” job.  Fortune soon smiled upon me.  Scouring the interwebs for a viable situation within a 50-mile radius of where I was living, I found one.  On Craigslist, no less.  It was a civil service post with a social services agency in a town called Linden.  I’d never heard of Linden even though it was only 48 miles away according to Google Maps. 

A few mouse clicks later I discovered Linden, population 650, was located in the remote Stultus Valley.  Remote…and yet still within my geographical distance criteria.  Intrigued, I uploaded my resume. 

To my great surprise, I was notified just days later that I had received a civil service exam waiver and when was I available for an interview? 

My luck held as I made my journey through a light snowfall to Linden.  The interview was brief, but pleasant.  I’d gathered what scant data I could concerning Stultus County and its social services programs and used it to good effect answering the questions posed to me. 

I’m not much of a charmer usually, but I clearly made a good impression that day.  Within an hour of leaving the interview, I got a message on my voicemail telling me I’d landed the job.  As it was the best (and only) prospect I had at the moment, I accepted.  What else was I going to do?

And so, inside of two weeks, my life changed completely as I blindly followed my chosen course.  I withdrew from graduate school and moved into a rented house in Linden. 

I started off with enthusiasm and hope at my new job.  My naïve optimism soon foundered as I got to know my new neighbors, a breed of folks I found at once strange and familiar.  Stultus Valley and its residents were to leave a lasting impression, memories which I now feel compelled to revisit.

Next installment: Meeting the Neighbors

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar