Hope and Hank Williams, Jr. at Emory Pass

Text and Photos by Roberta Brown

It's a truism that teachers learn as much from their students as their students learn from them, and sometimes more. Today, on a drive to Emory Pass, I remembered a student who graduated a few years back, and wondered how he was doing. He was an older student who had returned to college, was extremely excited to be there, and unlike some younger ones who take a while to feel comfortable in college courses, he settled in quickly, writing freely about his life and experiences.

In one paper, he wrote about a song that was extremely meaningful to him and those in his generation who grew up in Grant County in the 1980s. It is the Hank Williams, Jr. tune, "A Country Boy Can Survive," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cQNkIrg-Tk and though I never recalled having heard it, I quickly located and played it on Spotify. This memorable song celebrates country people from various U.S. regions who possess practical skills that are helpful, or even essential, in rough times, such as the one the nation is going through now: "I can plow a field all day long / I can catch catfish from dusk till dawn / We make our own whiskey and our own smoke too / Ain't too many things these old boys can't do." When I asked him and the other students if they, like the man in the song, could "skin a buck" and "run a trout line," they replied without hesitation, "Yes, ma'am."

My admiration was and is real. I doubt that I have any survival skills, but my students do, and as the older students discussed the song and why it resonated strongly with them, they pointed out that it captures how they have always felt in the face of economic downturns; they have the skills to survive, such as hunting deer, and catching fish.

I imagine that the student who wrote about "A Country Boy Can Survive" takes comfort in that song's lyrics now, during the coronavirus pandemic. Of course, everyone needs stores, goods, and services for some things, but when last month a different student joined class from his cellphone via Zoom on a turkey hunt in the Burro mountains, it occurred to me that there is a kind of calm confidence that survival skills of the sort Williams describes can lend. I think it's why I recently started baking bread from scratch and why some friends have either started or expanded backyard gardens. In the face of so much we cannot control, we take comfort in that which we can.

With this on my mind at Emory Pass, I perused the display commemorating the Silver Fire of 2013--reading about how it began, how it was fought, and how the land recovered from it. One caption under photos of greening forest floors reads: "Burn scars are magnets for wildlife; the disturbance to the landscape jumpstarts a whole set of complex interactions." It goes on to explain that the dead trees attract insects, who attract more birds. New grasses attract rodents, who then draw owls and hawks, and so on. In other words, the fire's aftermath replaced horror with hope, and death with life.

I needed to read that sign and see that mountain range again. Shards of hope can be hard to find these days as death tolls rise, fall, and rise again while humanity figures out how to put out the coronavirus fire, and even though I lack the survival skills Williams describes in his song, the growth up on Emory Pass is a reminder that, to quote Hank Williams, "country folk can survive."