THERE WERE POSSIBILITIES

Aubrrey and Linda Raper have lived in the Big Laurel section of Madison County since 1978. Aubrey is originally from Norfolk, Virginia, and Linda is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They’ve been farming their land since they arrived: initially raising tobacco and tomatoes, and since 1997, a mix of certified organic vegetables. They’ve also raised three children on their farm.

Aubrey: My childhood memories of community were terrific. The classic description of a perfect night was you were out until real late, sweaty as you could be, the popcorn man had come by with his little popcorn push-cart, and maybe earlier in the day the popsicle guy had come buy with a freezer truck. We had our bicycles. We had a pomegranate tree that was just divine, and we ate pomegranates until we got tired of that, and then we threw pomegranates at each other.

Food was important, and everybody cooked. There wasn’t any air-conditioning back then, and people’s windows were open, and the smell of pork loin or chitlins. We ate with each other. It was very casual and we didn’t have to set up appointments to see each other. It was just a delightful place.

Linda: I grew up with real close family ties; family is everything. After WW II, all these little housing developments sprang up all over, and we were in one of those. But right up the street was farmland and big pastures. So we were in a transitional area, and not too far away were orchards. We would get vegetables in the summer time and apples in the fall. But my folks were very much working class and my mom was thrilled to not have to do things by hand. She didn’t want a food freezer. She didn’t want to put up food. There were lots of kids in the neighborhood and we lived on a dead-end street, right next to a big woods. We ran wild in the summer time and my mom loved that; she encouraged that. We had as much inventive time and run around time as we wanted. We made campfires. We dug holes. We climbed trees. We did whatever we wanted to.

Aubrey: My parent’s generation was just off the farm, but I didn’t see any DNA evidence that I wanted to be a farmer. We ended up farming in self-defense, just a bad food system in the 60’s and 70’s; and the realization that to feed kids, you had to be careful. One of my focuses at the time was on land use, and in development, and how changes were occurring. I grew up with one of my feet on the Outer Banks and Currituck County, and in the course of twenty-some years, I witnessed this transition of that place; headed towards a development spiral that I sensed was going to be bad for us. I saw corridors being cut off to public access, to water, and to a large degree that continued. We wanted to roll the clock back to a place where communities seemed to be intact, and development seemed a long way off. We were hoping to raise our kids where the aesthetics of their lives didn’t change, that they lived in a natural environment. It was really easy here, other than our immediate families who said, “why are you all doing that?” You didn’t have a world grabbing at you; you didn’t have a world trying to sell you stuff all the time. We wanted everything to slow way down and raise our kids in a community that knew each other’s names. And so our creek became the world.

Linda: It felt like there were possibilities here; we didn’t even know what they were when we moved here. There was a tobacco allotment, and somebody grew tomatoes, so we could probably do the same thing. But there was timber, there was water, and there was a sense that you could be resourceful here.

Aubrey: The nature for this community is dramatically changed in that most of the citizens of Foster Creek are plugged into the outside world differently then I would ever thought they would be in our lifetime. The end of tobacco quotas and tobacco production, the desire for public work and health plans, and human needs, and human desires with the new highway to get to jobs. These small communities are less remote than they used to be. About six months ago the latest cell tower gave access to this holler; and that’s pretty significant and symbolic in that it affords work opportunities differently for people working from home. You can be in a remote place like this and be as connected as you want to be.

Linda: When we moved here land was $500 an acre, and then in ten or fifteen years it moved on up to $3,000 an acre. It has been a gradual increase, and then all of a sudden, it’s $10,000 an acre. Land is worth so much, and because we have sixty-seven acres, we could sell it for way more than we even think. I don’t even know what that means because we don’t want to sell. What does it mean to have land that’s worth all this money only if you sell? What’s the point in that? The kinds of development that we’ve heard about going on in the county – it’s like how it’s done is as important as what it is. Some of it is, “it’s my land, and I don’t care about my neighbors. I don’t care about the impact. I’m just gonna do this thing.” And that is just such a foreign attitude, based on how everybody was when we moved here, and how they continue to be. You have a direct effect on your neighbors; what you do has a direct effect. And sure, everybody has a right to do with their land as they see fit, but somehow you have to consider your neighbors in all that too, and that seems lacking in some of these developments. It’s a conflict area now.

Aubrey: I love talking about Madison County because of the lessons I’ve watched our kids learn from here. I just realize our instincts were right on the essential qualities; that to be a civil, social human being can be learned in a very ruff, remote, challenging place. But that place affords certain qualities that other environments don’t afford, and one of them is it’s damn quiet here. You can hear yourself thinking all the time. Respecting things about the existing community that are paid close attention to by local people; I can’t tell you how important that is. I think I know what’s in our kid’s hearts, and it is the realization that the most ordinary person is important and is worthy of time, and that you’re no more important then they are.

Linda: I do get homesick for here when I’m not here; when I’ve had to go to Florida, or even D.C., visiting the girls. I’m always thirsty. I can never get enough water it seems to me. It’s easy to get caught up in the hubbub when you’re visiting somewhere. But when I’m at those places, and I think about what I’m not doing, then I get homesick.

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