Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, White Rural Rage

At Amazon, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. #CommissionEarned. 

Young and Homeless in Rural America

It's hard out there. 

At the New York Times, "Most social services come through the schools — but it can be impossible to get to them":

One evening in June, Scott Cooper, a high school football coach in rural southern Ohio, received a text from Blake, one of his linebackers. Blake, who was 17, would miss practice the next day, and so would his brother Lee Jr., who was 15. Another text followed with an explanation: Their family had to move, and right away. They didn’t know where, but it would probably mean leaving River Valley High School.

In Cooper’s view, the brothers, each soft-spoken, each over six feet tall, had real promise. They’re “good kids,” he said, “very respectful, and their upside as players is very high.” They would show up on weekends to help make goody bags for team fund-raisers or sandwiches for a charity event. Sometimes they would stay after scrimmages with their mom, dad, little sister and two younger brothers, helping Cooper’s wife hand out hot dogs from a flowered crock pot until the sky streaked pink and the stadium lights popped on.

The family, including an older brother who had graduated from high school, had left their last home suddenly as well, just 18 months earlier. Before moving to Gallia County, they lived in Portsmouth, about an hour’s drive west, where the boys’ father, Lee, worked in landscaping and their mother, LeAnn, collected workers’ compensation after injuring her back as a home health aide. With a population of about 20,000, Portsmouth was hit particularly hard by the opioid epidemic and its fallout. The family rented a government-subsidized house between an abandoned building and a house where drug deals took place at all hours, LeAnn said. The neighbors rummaged through their trash and dumped needles and buckets of human waste in their yard. The sexual trafficking of children for drugs had become a significant local problem. Fearing for their safety, the family fled in December 2020. (I have used middle names or initials to protect the privacy of the families I met.)

Once they left subsidized housing, the family, like an increasing number of Americans, struggled to find a place that they could afford. They crowded in with LeAnn’s mother, then her sister, and as they searched, the children tried to keep up with their studies at their old schools. They had switched to remote learning during the pandemic, but rural internet access is spotty, and they often couldn’t log on. After three months, the family gave up on finding a place of their own and reluctantly moved to Gallia County, to live with Lee’s dad. Lee had a very troubled relationship with his father, and the family was not optimistic about the move. “It was a last resort,” LeAnn said grimly.

For a while, the arrangement worked better than expected. The kids enrolled in new schools, with Blake and Lee Jr. landing at River Valley High. They got good grades, and Blake wowed everyone with his beautiful tenor voice in show choir. In the spring, he started dating a girl he met in rehearsals for a school production of “Bye Bye Birdie.” Over time, LeAnn said, they “got back into who they used to be.”

But the situation with Lee’s father became volatile. The night Blake texted Cooper, his grandfather had thrown the family out. They had nowhere to go. Cooper wanted to help but didn’t know where to start. He asked the principal what to do, and he said: Ask Sandy. She’ll know.

Sandra Plantz, an administrator at Gallia County Local Schools for more than 20 years, oversees areas as diverse as Title I reading remediation and federal grants for all seven of the district’s schools, including River Valley High. In recent years, though, she has leaned in hard on a role that is overlooked in many districts: homeless liaison. Her district serves just under 3,000 students but covers some 450 square miles of an area that doesn’t offer much in the way of a safety net beyond the local churches. The county has no family homeless shelters, and those with no place to go sometimes end up sleeping in the parking lot of the Walmart or at the hospital emergency room. As homelessness increased in the county in recent years, Sandra and her husband, Kevin, a juvenile probation officer, found themselves at the center of an informal advocacy team.

In 2018, Kevin and a few other local law-enforcement agents started a group they called Code 10 Ministries to raise money to pay for motel stays for families in immediate need of shelter. When Cooper reached out to Sandra, she asked Kevin to have Code 10 pay for two rooms for two nights for Blake’s family at the Travelodge, a grim hotel across from the county fairgrounds.

Sandra then introduced the family to the process of applying for HUD housing. Subsidized housing from HUD is effectively a lottery; nationally there are only 36 units available for every 100 families who qualify, and the requirements can be hard to navigate. Plantz told them that purchasing their own motel room could set back the clock on when they could qualify as “HUD homeless” — vulnerable enough for long enough to be eligible for housing assistance. She found a woman from her church who would pay for a few more nights instead.

No one could afford to keep paying for the motel rooms, but neither did anyone want to see the family move to a tent in a park, which was an option they had been weighing. Cooper’s wife wanted to let the littlest children sleep at their house, but Plantz advised that this, too, could compromise their status as officially homeless. Cooper had an old camper he was fixing up for the county fair in August — just to get out of the sun on long days — and he offered it to the family. It had no water, working bathroom or propane tank for the stove. The oldest boys had to duck their heads every time they stood up, and they all slept on the floor or in the family’s minivan. June became July, then August, and no better housing option emerged. When the new school year began, Blake and Lee Jr. headed back to River Valley High — and a few weeks later, the family finally moved into HUD housing.

Families like Blake’s don’t fit easily into the “homeless industrial complex,” as some advocates for homeless youth and families have taken to calling the funding mechanisms, rules and priorities that determine the fates of millions of Americans who struggle with housing insecurity every year. The system is focused largely on adults experiencing homelessness in cities, and it is not well equipped to address the types of homelessness experienced by children and families, especially in rural areas. The limited data that exists suggests that rural students face homelessness in roughly the same proportion as their urban counterparts — and with far less in the way of a support system. In this vacuum of resources, schools sometimes offer the only form of help available to homeless families. Over the course of reporting in rural Ohio, I spoke with school officials, homeless advocates, students and their families. I met young people living in trailers that stank of sewage, mothers sexually harassed by predatory landlords, families who could not take their children to the doctor because they could not afford gas for the long trip. For all of them, the stakes of precarious housing were high. Homeless students have the worst educational outcomes of any group, the lowest attendance, the lowest scores on standardized tests, the lowest graduation rates. They all face the same cruel paradox: Students who do not have a stable place to live are unable to attend school regularly, and failing to graduate from high school is the single greatest risk factor for future homelessness...

Biden's Win Hides Dire Warning for Democrats in Rural U.S.

I'm been giddy about this, especially because radical leftists and Democrats (but I repeat myself) have no clue. I've been shouting this from the rooftops to family members and friends since the election. I'm now dead to them, especially my older sister (who calls me "Mr. Republican," which I'm most definitely not, lol) and her friends. 

At the Minneapolis Tribune, "While Democrats powered through cities and suburbs to reclaim the White House, the party slid further behind in huge rural swaths of northern battlegrounds."

Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.

The Prosperity Paradox

From Ronald Brownstein, at CNN, "The prosperity paradox is dividing the country in two":

"The big blue metros believe their eco success is threatened by the Trump agenda of hostility to immigration & free trade, prioritization of tax cuts over investments in education & scientific research,the stoking of racial tensions" & SALT deduction limit https://t.co/BmTuqHfZNL

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) January 23, 2018

While President Donald Trump relentlessly claims credit for the strengthening economy, the nation's economic growth is being driven overwhelmingly by the places that are most resistant to him.

Counties that voted for Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016 accounted for nearly three-fourths of the nation's increased economic output and almost two-thirds of its new jobs in the years leading up to his election, according to previously unpublished findings provided to CNN by the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.

That imbalance looks even starker when considering that Clinton won less than one-sixth of the nation's counties. Trump carried more counties than any candidate in either party since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Yet it is the diverse major metropolitan areas that voted in preponderant numbers against Trump that have clearly emerged as the nation's engines of growth. In the process, the big blue metros have pulled further away from the small town and rural communities that provide the foundation of Trump's support.

The key to this divergence has been the large metro areas' dominance of the job opportunities created by the diffusion of digital technologies, largely in white-collar industries from business consulting to software development. Meanwhile, smaller places remain much more reliant on resource extraction (like oil and gas production), manufacturing and agriculture, which have not grown nearly as reliably, or explosively, as the digital economy.

"We have two quite different economies, and what is happening in recent years is growth is largely emanating from these big county metros," says Mark Muro, director of policy at the Metropolitan Policy Program. "These are not political trends. They are deep economic and technological long waves. And while we are in the midst of this long wave, we are not near the end of it."

These trends long predate Trump's presidency. But the President's policy agenda, which prioritizes reviving manufacturing and promoting energy development, generally favors the smaller places over the large metros -- many of which feel threatened by his initiatives, from restricting immigration and trade to limiting the deductibility of state and local taxes.

Muro, like many economic analysts, is dubious that anything Trump does can meaningfully unwind the consolidation of economic opportunity into the largest metropolitan areas. If anything, Muro says, the tilt toward the big blue metros has intensified in recent years. "We think this is a fundamental sea change," he says.

This pattern creates what could be called the prosperity paradox. Even as economic growth is concentrating in Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas thriving in the information economy, Republicans rooted in non-urban communities largely excluded from those opportunities now control all the levers of power in Washington and in most states. That disjuncture raises a pointed long-term question: How long can the places that are mostly lagging in the economy dictate the terms of politics and policy to the places that are mostly succeeding?

Generally through American history, political power has followed economic power. From the Civil War through the Great Depression, Republicans controlled the White House for 56 of 72 years as the party of the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing Northeast and Midwest. During that era, Democrats were marginalized politically as the champions of the agricultural and resource-producing South and West that felt sublimated by the Northern-based industrial and financial economic order.

In the decades just before and after World War II, Franklin Roosevelt built an impregnable New Deal Democratic coalition that married support from traditionally internationalist Eastern business and finance interests with new efforts to integrate the South and West into the national economy (through mechanisms ranging from the Tennessee Valley Authority to the World War II defense buildup). Similarly, the shift of economic clout to the Sun Belt after World War II prefigured the conservative movement's resurgence from the 1960s through the 1990s around Republicans Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Ronald Reagan of California.

Today the nation's core economic divide is less between regions than within them. After mostly declining through the late 20th century, the large metropolitan areas have restored their position as the locus of growth across the country by emerging as the epicenter of the information economy.

That advantage has allowed many metropolitan areas to achieve booming levels of growth and investment unmatched for decades: Tim Burgess, who served as acting Seattle mayor last fall, for instance, recently told me that the city is now enjoying its best economy since the Klondike gold rush in the 1890s. The intense nationwide competition for the second Amazon headquarters -- which produced finalists located solely in large metropolitan areas -- underscores how digital technologies are concentrating economic opportunity into the nation's biggest places.

Data from Muro and Brookings research assistant Jacob Whiton quantify the dramatic extent of that shift.

In 2016, Clinton won fewer than 500 counties and Trump won more than 2,600. But the counties that Clinton carried accounted for 72% of the nation's increased economic output from 2014 through 2016, the most recent years for which figures are available, according to Brookings. The Clinton counties accounted for 66% of the new job growth over that period as well.

In both output and employment the Clinton counties over that recent period accounted for an even higher percentage of the new growth than they did from 2010 through 2016, the full period of recovery from the financial crash of 2008.

The tilt away from Trump is even more pronounced at the very top of the economic pyramid. Of the 30 counties that generated the largest share of new jobs from 2014 through 2016, Trump carried only two: Collin County (north of Dallas) and Maricopa (Arizona), where Republican-leaning suburbs slightly outvoted a strongly Democratic metro core in Phoenix.

Clinton carried all the other places leading the employment growth list. That included not only such blue state behemoths as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Seattle, but also the economic hubs in purple and even Republican-leaning states, from Miami, Oakland County (outside Detroit), to Mecklenburg (Charlotte) and Wake (Raleigh) counties in North Carolina, and Dallas, Bexar (San Antonio) and Travis counties (Austin) in Texas.

In all, Brookings calculated, Clinton won 79 of the 100 counties that contributed the most to economic growth from 2014 to 2016, and 76 of the 100 that generated the most job growth...

These are the fault lines of the next American civil war. When and how it all goes to hell, who knows? But something this fundamentally radical will bring an eruption at some point, and those who anticipate the collapse will be better prepared for the fighting and the fallout.

Still more.

Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow

This book is out today, at Amazon, Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia.

Report from Virginia's Governor's Race

From the indubitable Salena Zito, at the New York Post, "The Democrats should be terrified by this governor's race":

The Democrats should be terrified by this governor's race https://t.co/G4qQ8n0BJN my report from Virginia

— SalenaZito (@SalenaZito) October 21, 2017

WINCHESTER, VA. — The melodic sounds of a street musician’s trumpet echo through every corner of this old Virginia town as locals shop or make their way to lunch. Daren Johnson has been blowing his horn at the pedestrian mall in the shadow of the Shenandoah Valley Civil War Museum for over an hour. He performs for two reasons: “To make some extra cash and to share a little bit of lightness. We are exhausted as a country,” he said, “a direct result of last year’s election.”

Johnson and his wife were tireless volunteers for Hillary Clinton last year. They knocked on doors, they made phone calls, they were invested. When she lost, the couple was devastated. Now, Johnson doesn’t even know who is running for governor.

“I’ve voted every year for the past 46 years, always informed, always enthusiastic, always involved in the process. Now, it’s really hard to care,” Johnson said.

The upcoming gubernatorial election in Virginia is one of only two happening in the country this year, along with New Jersey. The race pits Ralph Northam, the current lieutenant governor and a Democrat, against Ed Gillespie, a former George W. Bush administration official and Republican National Committee chairman.

Northam should have a comfortable lead right now. Terry McAuliffe, the outgoing governor he currently serves under, is popular and generally seen as successful. Plus, Virginians have historically elected governors from the party opposite to a president who’s won the year before. In 2001, Democrat Mark Warner won one year after George W. Bush was elected; in 2009, Republican Bob McDonnell won one year after Barack Obama took the state.

And, of course, there is the Trump factor — Clinton beat the president comfortably here, although almost all of her vote came from the heavily populated, heavily liberal Northern Virginia suburbs with the rest of the state (mostly rural, mostly forgotten) going for Donald Trump with the exception of the state capital and some college towns.

But Northam’s numbers are not up — in fact, the last three public polls show next month’s race within the margin of error. That includes a Monmouth University poll released Tuesday, which gives Gillespie the edge over Northam among likely voters by 48 to 47 percent.

Both parties have pulled out all the stops for this race. Ex-president Obama was here for a rally; George W. Bush for a fundraiser. Joe Biden’s stumped here, so has Vice President Mike Pence. So far, Trump has only tweeted about the race: “Ralph Northam, who is running for Governor of Virginia, is fighting for the violent MS-13 killer gangs & sanctuary cities. Vote Ed Gillespie!”

Gillespie has avoided broadcasting that endorsement on the campaign trail. There are no mentions of it on his website. After Trump claimed there were “some very fine people on both sides” of a neo-Nazi protest in nearby Charlottesville that left one woman dead, Gillespie’s spokesman Dave Abrams said the candidate “did not see any fine people on the side of the white nationalists and neo-Nazis.” But Gillespie has not directly criticized Trump either.

Meanwhile Stephanie Vaughan, the Democratic county chairperson in Winchester, says the party is working hard to clinch victory by appealing to a wider crowd. “We very much try to have a big-tent approach here. We welcome moderate, progressive and conservative Democrats into our party, and we encourage everyone to listen to our message,” she said. “Here our issues are pretty straightforward — transportation, education and health care.”

Behind the counter of her coffee shop, Lanita Byrne said she did not vote for Trump and loved Clinton but is completely undecided on which candidate she wants for governor. “Honestly it comes down to who is best on taxes. I think there should be less burdens and more opportunities for small-business owners,” she said.

Clark Hansbarger, meanwhile, said he saw the Trump win coming from a mile away. “I kept telling all of my liberal friends, and they would just laugh at me. They thought no way,” he said. Hansbarger then chuckles and admits he, too, is a liberal. “But, look, I travel a lot. When Trump spoke about carnage in his inaugural address, I’ve seen exactly what he meant all over the country,” he said.

Johnson begins to play his trumpet again, then stops. “I guess I’ll vote,” he admits. “But honestly I am sick of both parties . . . and I am not voting straight ticket, that is for sure.”

Certainly the Democrats are the ones with the most to lose...

More.

Trump Creates Chaos!

Heh.

I wonder if the chaos is the blow to the system more so than the promise-keeping itself, although the headline writer at USA Today isn't especially clear:

From Susan Page (who I like), "Analysis: Trump's start creates chaos by doing what he promised":

#PresidentTrump creates chaos by doing what he promised, keeping his promises! #MAGA https://t.co/iBfJQfMpoD via @SusanPage

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 29, 2017

WASHINGTON — New presidents typically start with a flurry of actions designed to demonstrate to supporters and opponents alike that they will deliver on their campaign promises, and that there is a new guy in charge.

But never in modern times — a phrase that Donald Trump has made familiar in his opening 10 days in the White House — has there been a whirlwind of action that has so disrupted the political order. President Trump has opened a breach with Mexico over building a wall, created chaos at U.S. airports by blocking immigrants from Muslim countries, moved to undercut the Affordable Care Act even before Congress formally resumes debate over repealing it and more.

In other words, after a campaign that upended political assumptions, Trump has grabbed the headlines and prompted protests in the streets and the courts by doing precisely what he said he would do if elected.

"We've been in office now for about seven or eight days, and we've done an incredible amount," White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said Sunday on CBS' Face the Nation after deflecting questions on the orders to begin building a wall along the southern border and to temporarily block refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries. "I think that one thing people can say about President Trump is that he's following through on his promises, and I don't think people should be surprised that he's doing it. I'm kind of surprised that people are surprised that he's actually conducting himself exactly the way he said he would."

It has been a surprise to those who assumed candidate Trump had more of a combative attitude than a specific policy plan. That gave rise to the observation, first credited to Saleno Zito of The Atlantic, that Trump's supporters took him seriously but not literally, while journalists took him literally but not seriously.

What's also surprised many is the speed with which Trump has moved, in some cases reportedly without the traditional consultation with members of his Cabinet, leaders of Congress or even the government lawyers who customarily would review the language and legal basis for the executive orders and presidential memorandums he has signed with fanfare.

Of course, presidents who have taken over at times of crisis have acted in the past with far-reaching actions and left it to the future for the courts and the critics to sort out. Franklin Roosevelt, taking over during the depths of the Great Depression, on the day after being inaugurated in 1933 declared a bank holiday and called Congress into special session. When he took office in 1861, Abraham Lincoln was dealing with a nation being split by Southern secession.

This time, though, Trump isn't taking over at a time of war or economic calamity. He has in effect created his own sense of crisis, a situation he seems to find useful when it comes to dominating the debate and conducting negotiations.

And while FDR coined the idea of the "first 100 days" as a measure for decisive action, Trump seems to be speeding up even that timetable — akin to his mode of unprecedented and instantaneous presidential communication via the burst of 140-character tweets...

More.

The Democrats' Rise Is Far From Inevitable

Well, rising Democrats are more than far from inevitable the way things have been going this last week, with a collective leftist temper tantrum practically equal to an extinction level event, a Democrat Party extinction, lol.

From Megan McArdle, at Bloomberg:

The Democrats' Rise Is Far From Inevitable, writes @asymmetricinfo https://t.co/EZzqhzrLUP

— Milena Rodban (@MilenaRodban) January 24, 2017

Why are the left's public demonstrations more impressive than its voter turnout? Because there are a whole lot of Democrats in the large population centers where such demonstrations are generally held. People can join a protest simply by getting on the subway; it's an easy show of force.

But there are a lot of small towns in America, and as Sean Trende and David Byler recently demonstrated, those small towns are redder than ever. Effectively, the Democratic coalition has self-gerrymandered into a small number of places where they can turn out an impressive number of feet on the ground, but not enough votes to win the House. Certainly not enough to win the Senate or the Electoral College, which both favor sparsely populated states and discount the increasingly dense parts of the nation.

The Senate map in 2018 is brutal for Democrats. If Democrats want to get their mojo back, they’re going to need to do more than get a small minority of voters to turn out for a march. They’re going to need to get back some of those rural votes.

To do that, they’re probably going to have to let go of the most soul-satisfying, brain-melting political theory of the last two decades: that Democrats are inevitably the Party of the Future, guaranteed ownership of the future by an emerging Democratic majority in minority-white America. This theory underlay a lot of Obama’s presidency, and Clinton’s campaign. With President Trump's inauguration on Friday, we saw the results.

Why was this such a bad theory? Let me count the ways...

Heh, that's the best.

Keep reading.

WaPo Reporter Christopher Ingraham Visits Red Lake County, Minnesota — And He Likes It!

I was reluctant to even read this Christopher Ingraham essay, it being at Ezra Klein's old "Wonk Blog," but it's a pretty interesting piece. I can appreciate reporters who are self-depreciating.

Click though at Instapundit, "BELTWAY REPORTER DISCOVERS AMERICA: I called this place ‘America’s worst place to live.’ Then I went there."

The Rural Way

From Victor Davis Hanson, at PJ Media:

Rural life reminds us that we are mere custodians who don’t really own anything, given that the land endures as we turn to dust.

I like the people who reside in these environs — the 85-year-old woman who lives alone with her shotgun; my closest friend around the corner, Bus Barzagus of Fields Without Dreams, going strong at 73. None want to go to L.A. or San Francisco. Another neighbor who is a mechanical genius, and so on. One guy told me the other day, “What am I going to do, put my 150 acres on my back and pack it over to Nevada?”

Otherwise, all the farm families I grew up with but one are gone. There are no 40-acre or 100-acre autonomous farms left. Everything is rented out, small tesserae of much larger corporate mosaics. Looking out the window reminds me it didn’t have to end this way, but how and why not is well beyond my intelligence. (Count up the cost of tractors, implements, labor, chemicals, liability insurance, taxes, etc. — and anything less than 150 acres does not pencil out.)

The old farmhouses are all rented out to foremen, 100% of them first-generation immigrants from Mexico. The Punjabi farming class has become a sort of new aristocracy, if their huge three-story mansions that pop up every couple of miles are any indication.

I worry though not about the way we look or talk, but rather about the use of the land. It no longer grows people, or produces for the nation a 5% minority of self-reliant, cranky and autonomous citizens, who do not worry much about things like tanning booths, plastic surgery, Botox, male jewelry, tattoos, rap music, waxed-off body hair, or social media. I think our impoverished society reflects that fact of agrarian loss, in the sense that never have so many had so much and complained that they had so little while being so dependent on government — and yet they are so whiney and angry over their lack of independence. The entitlement state is the flame, the recipients the moths. The latter zero in on the glow and then, transfixed by the buzz, are consumed by acquiring what they were hypnotized by.

Out here is the antithesis of where I work in Silicon Valley. Each week I leave at sunbreak, and slowly enter a world of Pajama boys in BMWs and Lexuses, with $500 shades and rolling stops at intersections as they frown and speed off to the next deal. Somehow these techies assume voting for Barack Obama means that they are liberal. They are not. By proclaiming that they are progressive, they feel good about themselves and do not have to worry about why their janitorial staffs are not unionized, or why no one but they can buy a house, or why they oppose affordable housing construction along the 280 corridor, or why they fear the public schools as if they were the bubonic plague. Their businesses don’t create many jobs in the area; they don’t live among the Other; they seek to get out of paying income tax as they praise higher taxes; and they use money to ensure their own apartheid. And so they are “liberal.”

No wonder millionaires like Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer represent such a culture. How odd that the power, the water, the food, the lumber, and the minerals that fuel Silicon Valley all come from distant invisible people, the uncool who are overregulated, overtaxed, and over-blamed by those they never see.

Every six months or so I crawl under the house to check the wiring, plumbing, foundation, and assorted repair work. I did it last week. In the dirt is the weird detritus of 140 years: some square nails, a strange, ancient rusted pipe wrench, 1930s newspaper stuffed into some sort of mouse hole, penciled-in runes of weird numbers and notes scrawled on the redwood beams by some unknown carpenter, a fossilized carcass of a long dead cat, a few rat skulls and ribs. It is also sort of like archaeology, trying to sort out the layers of improvements per good farming years: the foundation raised on redwood beams after the boom of World War I, the metal conduit wiring installed in the 1940s when raisins were again high, the heating ducts put in during the brief boom of the early 1980s, and so on.

Is there a future to any of this?

Continue reading.

Having gone to Fresno State (and to live in the Central Valley) after having been raised in South California, away from all the rural things he talks about, I always have a personal reaction to his writings. Yet I've never met VDH. He was at the Horowitz West Coast Retreat a couple of years back, especially on the first night, when there was an ice-breaking party. But he was surrounded by fans so I never did get a chance to speak with him. I figured I'll meet him one of the days, and then I can tell him about living in Fresno and attending Fresno State while he was still on the faculty there. That will be nice.