Justin Rhodes has a million subscribers on YouTube. He is approachable and responsive and has been filmed extensively and has a book out and does public events. He is not hard to reach.
I am writing him a letter anyway, and publishing it, because the thing I want to ask him is the thing I have not seen anyone else ask.
Dear Justin,
My name is Matt Headley. I write for Southern Legends, a publication about Southern life and land based in Northeast Alabama. I am a flower farmer in Calhoun County, and I used to be a pastor, and your story is one of the few homesteading stories I have found that I think is telling the truth about what returning to land actually means.
Here is the thing I want to ask you about.
Your grandfather bought the farm in 1932. You grew up on it, left it, went to Honduras and Australia to learn permaculture properly, came back broke and sick with Lyme disease, and started farming the same land again. You did not buy land. You returned to land. That is a different story.
Most homestead content is a founding story, someone arrives somewhere new and builds something. Your story is a return story. You inherited something and left and came back to it. The land existed before you and will exist after you. Your grandfather walked those fields in the Thirties.
Wendell Berry has been arguing for sixty years that this is the thing that matters, the accumulation of knowledge and care in a specific place across generations, the continuity that cannot be transferred or started from scratch. He calls it "membership" in a place. You are practicing it. Most of the homestead internet is performing it.
I would like to ask you about the returning, not the building. About what it was like to come back to the grandfather's farm after the years away, and what the land held that you had not expected, and whether the permaculture training you brought back felt like an addition to what was already there or a replacement for it.
I would also like to ask about the hard years, the food stamps, the Lyme disease, the period before it worked. Because that narrative is in your content but it gets underemphasized in how people talk about your work, and it seems to me like the most important part. Failure that does not end in departure is a different story than success.
Thirty minutes by phone or a written exchange, either works.
Thank you for going back to the farm.
Matt Headley Calhoun County, Alabama matt@southernlegends.blog
He will probably respond. He is that kind of person.
The question I most want to ask him is not in the letter, because it is too personal for a cold correspondence: what does the grandfather's presence feel like on that land? Whether he thinks about him when he walks the fields. Whether the return was an act of continuity or an act of repair or both.
That question, if the interview happens, is the first one I will ask.
See the full profile: Justin Rhodes Went Back to His Grandfather's Land. And related: Wendell Berry Has Been Saying This for Sixty Years, on the philosophy of the return Justin Rhodes is practicing.
Responses