Response 4: Junkyard Legacy

I have never read anything like Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, and I don’t think I’ll ever read anything like it again.  A personal memoir of a childhood lived on a junkyard in rural Georgia, a moving piece of environmental writing in support of the longleaf pine forest and their apocalyptic destruction, and a commentary on society’s alienation from nature, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is brutally honest.  Ray writes of her family and their “legacy of ruination,” seeking to expunge a history of environmental destruction through the therapy of memoir and the revelation of beauty in nature. It creeps into dark memories of a broken family, confronts you with the heartbreaking truth of birds whose calls will never sing in the upcoming spring – for they are extinct – and very subtly pokes you with the idea that all our actions teeter a delicate scale, whose balance is essential to harmony. 

I see many similarities between Ray’s writing and the other authors we’ve read in this class.  Memoir is obviously a hugely important aspect in Ray’s book, and just as in Nancy Gift’s book, I was much more sympathetic to Ray’s environmental cause to save the longleaf pine forests because I felt a strong emotional connection to her family history and the personal significance the forests had in her life.  Ray channels a bit of Abbey too, in a chilled-out non-threatening way.  Abbey, when he’s not on his rants in Desert Solitaire, is illustrating for his reader what exactly is worth saving about the parks in the desert, which was crucial for me, as I’ve never had the privilege of traveling out there.  I was absolutely blown away by Abbey’s language, and Ray manages to evoke equally as vivid images of the longleaf pine forest, an even greater feat, as these forests don’t exist anymore.  Many of her descriptions of old-growth forests are how she imagined they must’ve looked by the way explorers described them in letters.  She then goes on to give the facts – .01% of old-growth longleaf pine forests exist today.  The rest were destroyed by loggers.

The beauty of the forests is irrelevant, though, in comparison to the crucial role the trees play in the longleaf pine forest ecosystem.  Ray brilliantly interweaves the narrative of her life growing up in the junkyard with chapters detailing different species of animals and how their existence is drastically affected by the absence of longleaf pines.  The reader begins to understand how crucial every detail in an ecosystem is, all the while bonding with Ray’s family through her personal narrative and gaining insight into the ecosystem of her people.  To a reader outside the realm of nature and environmental writing, the two narratives may come across as fragmented and separate.  I thought they connected beautifully because both were inextricably linked.  Ray’s family includes a history of mental illness.  Ray fears she too will become mentally ill – that she is endangered.  The mental illness that plagued her family created an isolation from their surroundings, which came from a fear of the wilderness that was implanted in Ray’s father by her grandfather.  Ray writes, “So much for tradition.  So much for a long line of outdoorspeople.  So much for the woods.  What my grandfather planted in my father was a crazy fear and mistrust of being lost in a wilderness alone.  If there ever was a wilderness misunderstood, insanity is it” (97.)  For the Ray family, the wilderness has become a place of brokenness, of sickness, of misunderstanding.  And like the forests that their ancestors chopped, endangering the species which once thrived there, Ray’s family is living in a tainted environment, surviving barely, as do the animals in those forests.  Ray, fearing she will follow the footsteps of her father and grandfather, seeks to go back to nature, to find peace with the longleaf pine forest, to rebirth it and therefore connect her family again with nature.  She writes, “I search for vital knowledge of the land that my father could not teach me, as he was not taught, and guidance to know and honor it, as he was not guided, as if this will shield me from the errancies of the mind, or bring me back from that dark territory should I happen to wander there.  I search as if there were a peace to be found” (97.)

Ray utilizes motifs of the animals that live in the longleaf pine forest and has them appear in both stories to strengthen the ties between the two narratives.  In the junkyard, Ray tells of a time when a boy who lived near them viciously killed a turtle.  Ray and her two brothers, who witnessed the act, were beaten by their father for not stopping the boy.  Later in the book, we find out that the gopher tortoise is one of the most important creatures in the longleaf pine forest, its burrow providing a refuge to over two hundred species when the forest catches fire.   Ray also tells in the junkyard narrative how whenever someone saw a snake, they’d kill it.  “Snakes were the lowliest of creatures, condemned by God to a life spent belly to ground.  One unlucky enough to reveal itself was a dead snake – nobody cared whether it was venomous or not.  If a snake crossed the road, you ran it over, pulling back and forth until it was unmistakably dead” (179.)  Later, in a chapter called “Indigo Snake,” Ray refers to this type of snake as “the most beautiful thing you’d ever want to see” (188.)  Endangered now because it takes refuge in gopher tortoise burrows, I still couldn’t help but think how many were killed by the people Ray were describing.  Ray makes a conscious choice to tell stories about snakes and turtles because she is trying to associate the junkyard with ruination.  Her people, whether they knew it or not, like her logger ancestors, were contributing to the destruction of their natural surroundings, and as a result, they were destroying themselves.  The junkyard is a mess of broken glass, jagged metal, exposed pipes, which will be stepped on.  As Ray goes out to repopulate the longleaf pine forests and retouch her roots with her surroundings, so she also hopes to rebirth the junkyard.  In the final chapter, “Second Coming,” she writes of the junkyard as she has of the longleaf pine forest, with statistics about its ecosystem, its promising future.  “Eighty to 95 percent of the metals of vehicles of that era are recyclable, but what do you do with the gas tanks?” (268)  It seems this will be her next endeavor.  Because after all, the junkyard is nature too.